Hellspark (12 page)

Tocohl gazed down at the slices of fruit spread on the surface of the table. “But you say artifact.”

Emphasizing his words with a clash of bracelets swift-Kalat said, “I say artifact.”

“They’re too curious not to be sentient,” said van Zoveel. “They are interested in everything.”

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“So’s Maggy,” said Alfvaen abruptly. She pointed: the arachne was opening cupboards.

“Cut that out, Maggy,” said Tocohl. “That’s impolite. You should always ask permission before you open a closed door.” (—At least, if you’re doing it in public,) she added, sotto voce.

Tocohl gestured. “Come over here.—I apologize, swift-Kalat. When you told us your house was ours, Maggy interpreted it in Hellspark. That’s the language she knows best.”

(You lie!) said Maggy.

(Polite, social,) Tocohl told her, (but take care not to call anyone a liar aloud in the presence of a Jenji. Now, come apologize.)

The arachne made a skittering dash for the spot Tocohl had indicated. “I’m sorry,” said Maggy, using the vocoder in the fat body.

“Don’t apologize to me, apologize to swift-Kalat. You know enough Jenji for that.”

The arachne dipped slightly before swift-Kalat and said, “I apologize if I have given offense. I

intended none.” Tocohl recognized the phrasing as her own, pitched to match Maggy’s voice.

Alfvaen delighted at their surprise. “Magic to a Hershlaing,” she said to Tocohl. Tocohl smiled.

(Hershlaing?) Maggy asked privately. Tocohl said, (Hershlaig is a mythical world so far off the beaten orbit that the Hershlaing consider any advanced science—even striking a match to light a fire—to be magic. Introduce yourself, Maggy, and give them an idea what state-of-the-art is.)

Before Maggy could begin, a tall creature pulled the door membrane aside and stepped, its feathers silvered with rainwater, into the cabin. It was a beautiful thing. Tocohl stared at it in wonder, and it stared back at her.

At last, she let go her breath. “Sprookjes—fairy tale creatures,” she said. “Now I understand the name.”

Maggy’s arachne walked slowly around the sprookje for a better look. The sprookje turned to follow the movement; it showed no hesitation in turning its back to the humans.

Tocohl rose, only the soft rustle of the moss cloak betraying her movement. Van Zoveel caught her am “They bite,” he said, quietly. “Everyone on the team has been bitten once.”

“Have there been any ill effects?”

“No, but I didn’t want you to be startled.”

Maggy had completed her circle and the sprookje was brought face-to-face with Tocohl. The two of them stared at each other. The creature’s brown and gold feathers gleamed and whispered as it took a step closer.

Tocohl held her ground. When the sprook stopped, she slowly and deliberately rolled up her cuff and lifted her arm to bring her hand a scant two centimeters from the beaklike mouth.

The sprookje accepted the invitation and bit, its head flashing forward with startling suddenness

Tocohl flinched but made no outcry—she was more surprised than hurt, for she hadn’t been snapped at by the potentially nasty beak. It was exactly like being stabbed with a pin.

She brought her hand slowly back to inspect the wound—yes, a mere pinprick.

“Buntec calls it their sampling tooth

,” van Zoveel volunteered. The sprookje now walked around Tocol in the manner of the arachne’s inspection.

Alfvaen gave a sharp cry of warning. Tocohl turned swiftly to find the sprookje drawing back. “I thought it meant to bite your shoulder,” Alfvaen explained “I’m sorry I startled you.”

(Maggy? What happened?) asked Tocohl; and Maggy replied, (It bit your cloak; from the trajectory, that was all it intended to sample.)

“Alfvaen,” Tocohl said aloud, “are you willing to try an experiment?”

“Yes, of course.”

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Tocohl unclasped her cloak and tossed it into the Siveyn’s arms. “Put that on,” she instructed,

“then come out here and do exactly as I did.”

Alfvaen followed her instructions to the letter, even to letting the sprookje complete the distance, as she had previously done with swift-Kalat. With the same deliberation Tocohl had used, she lifted her hand, and, as expected, the sprookje nipped. Tocohl watched the entire procedure as closely as she could. (Maggy? Did the sprookje’s cheek-feathers puff out, or was it my imagination?)

(No imagination—want to see?)

(No, I want to confirm that they didn’t when the sprookje nipped me.) (Confirmed,) said Maggy.

The creature circled Alfvaen slowly. Tocohl kept her attention close, curious to see what it would do about the cloak. After a moment, it seemed to have completed its inspection of her. It had completely ignored the moss cloak.

Then the sprookje’s beak flashed forward—Alfvaen yelped in surprise. Rubbing her wrist, where the sprookje had bitten her a second time, she said accusingly to van Zoveel, “You said everyone had been bitten once! I thought you meant only once!”

“He did!” said swift-Kalat. “You are the first to have been bitten more than once!” He was echoed word for word by the sprookje.

One could easily develop a stutter from speaking in the presence of one of these creatures, thought

Tocohl; it was like listening to oneself on a two-second delay.

Tocohl was struck by another oddity: the puzzling fact that the sprookje echoed only swift-Kalat.

Swift-Kalat seemed to have learned to ignore it. He came toward Tocohl excitedly, “And the cloak!

Why would it bite your cloak?”

The excitement was too much for the sprookje. Even as it repeated swift-Kalat’s words, it backed hastily away, its cheek-feathers now unmistakably puffed.

“Quietly,” said Tocohl. “—That’s a moss cloak,” she explained. “Your sprookje can obviously tell the difference between living and nonliving. It didn’t bite the arachne, after all. And it lost interest in the moss cloak having bitten it once.”

She glanced at the pinprick on her wrist. “I think ‘sample tooth’ is dead on.—As for Alfvaen, Alfvaen tastes different than the rest of us

!”

“Of course,” said Alfvaen, “I have Cana’s disease!”

“Yes,” said Tocohl. (Maggy,) she added privately (tomorrow morning, if necessary, I will have a violent attack of an unidentifiable plague, probably from having been bitten by our fine feathered friend over there. If I have to get this planet quarantined to gain time, I will!) Sunrise on Flashfever met the omnipresent rainclouds with a rare brilliance. From within swift Kalat’s cabin came the sweet, silvery sound of the tyril. Tocohl leaned back against the door frame to appreciate them both before returning her consideration to the compound.

Any creature’s behavior is affected by its environment. Like most survey camps Tocohl had seen, this was utilitarian. It was standard operating procedure to sterilize an area of ground for base camp.

Here, the result was thick red mud everywhere. Tocohl thought it odd that no walks had been built, either at ground level or higher. The uniform, nondescript cabins (a small town of them—privacy was a very real need when some forty people had to spend two to ten years together) stood partly raised from the mud on stubby stilts.

Only one of these had been personalized on the exterior. It was painted a lavish blue and decorated with Yn mystic symbols of white and gold. Two pennants hung near the door,
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drooping heavily with rainwater. That must have belonged to the dead man, Oloitokitok, she thought.

A sprookje splashed through muddy puddles to stop some distance away. Seemingly attracted by the sound of swift-Kalat’s tyril, it cocked its head to listen, but made no attempt to mimic the spritely dance tune. After a while, it knelt, pressed its hands into the mud. She wondered what it might be doing.

The sprookje’s presence reminded Tocohl that she was ill—ill with something unknown but not

debilitating enough to require bed rest. With Maggy’s assistance, she chose a handful of symptoms and set to work initiating them.

By the time she was done, the sprookje also had finished its task, if indeed it had been at one, and stood gracefully. It ran long fingers through the feathers on its knees and shook away some of the clinging mud. Tocohl blinked at it but, for a moment, she could not see clearly.

Still dazed from effort, she was dazzled by the flashwood that ringed the camp, pressing at every length of fence, as if offended by and yet drawn to the barren space within. Its glitter made the camp more stark by contrast.

As her vision cleared, she saw that the fence was barbed wire, not the electrified barrier favored by survey teams. When the dance tune came to an end, she peeled back the membrane and asked swift-Kalat, “Why barbed wire?”

Swift-Kalat laid his tyril aside and joined her in the doorway. His glittering bracelets and the sun raising iridescent highlights in his black braid shamed the compound as much as the flashwood.

“So much of Flashfever’s wildlife uses electricity as an energy source that an electric fence only attracts trouble. Buntec suggested we try that sort. It works quite well.”

“I see,” said Tocohl.

She judged it time to act, and because swift-Kalat was Jenji and had the traditional reputation for truthfulness, she decided to let him draw his own conclusions. She raised her hand to her forehead and, looking puzzled, let the blood drain from her face as if she might faint.

“Your hand,” he said, and caught her wrist to examine the pinprick she’d received from the sprookje the night before.

The area around the puncture was an angry red and slightly puffed—a matter of dilating the local capillaries. Once done, Tocohl could maintain it indefinitely without strain, despite the effort of concentration it required to initiate.

It had the desired effect. Swift-Kalat pressed gently but firmly at the edges of the swollen area; his fingers left whitened marks. Tocohl winced. “The doctor must see this,” said swift-Kalat. Without releasing her hand, he drew her across the compound to the blue cabin. He struck a chime.

“You may enter,” said a regal voice from within.

The survey team’s doctor sat cross-legged in the center of the room, on a blue mat ornamented with designs of power. Her mouth was broad and rich with hidden smiles, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes could only have come from laughter. Her whole face was designed for joy—and yet she did not smile. Her dark eyes brimmed with anger, although it was not directed at Tocohl or swift-Kalat.

She was plump and deceptively well muscled beneath that plumpness. By swift-Kalat’s standards she was, no doubt, overweight; but Tocohl, who was already thinking in Yn, took her on her own culture’s terms and found her beautiful.

In her lap lay the rich glitter of a koli thread with its fantastical tangle of knots. Around her lay a chalice, three silver knives, and a strawlike pile of jievnal sticks: she was preparing to enter deep mourning. Tocohl was glad she had decided to act quickly; to interrupt mourning
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would be risky, even for her.

Tocohl raised both hands in greeting and, as the woman lifted her head and hands to reply in kind, all of Tocohl’s hopes for a quarantine vanished. Two long scars slashed across her left cheek and on each index finger she bore a bluestone ring. The doctor was an Yn shaman.

“I am layli-layli calulan

,” she said, in a cool, quiet voice.

Tocohl inclined her head a fraction of an inch and responded, “I am the tocohli susumo

.” To give one’s true name to an Yn was to give that Yn power over one. Accordingly the Hellsparks had, from the very beginning of their trade relationships with the Yn, convinced them that no Hellspark name was more than a title, the equivalent of the designations Yn women gave to others. She also took the liberty of ascribing to herself the sound of power, the tiny phoneme

, which gave her status, though nothing like i that the doubling gave i layli-layli calulan

.

“You lie,” said the shaman, in GalLing’.

Swift-Kalat took in his breath with a hiss. His braceleted arm came up as if to ward off a blow, but

Tocohl caught it and quieted him with the sharp negative tap of a finger.

To layli-layli

, she said solemnly, “As do you.”

(I don’t understand,) said the voice in Tocohl’s ear.

(Check a tourist guide to Y and I’ll fill you in later, Maggy.) Tocohl turned to swift-Kalat. His forehead was beaded with sweat. “It is a ritual greeting,” she said.

“I apologize for the mistranslation.”

Swift-Kalat jerked his head from one to the other. “In my culture,” he said, “it is an insult of the highest order.”

“I am aware of that. I said, ‘mistranslation,’” Tocohl repeated. “The Yn word means both ‘lie’

and

‘dream’—it only becomes a problem when you try to pick an equivalent in GalLing’.

There no is equivalent in GalLing’, but ‘dream’ is much closer to its emotional meaning.”

She could see him make a visible effort to replace his emotional reaction with an intellectual one.

Then he pointed to Tocohl’s swollen hand. “She was bitten by a sprookje,” he began.

Tocohl interrupted. “Your pardon, swift-Kalat, but I must speak to layli-layli calulan alone.”

Gratefully, swift-Kalat accepted the dismissal.

When he was gone, layli-layli calulan said, “You are not alone with me.”

Tocohl was startled. Either layli-layli calulan was sharp-eyed enough to have seen the muscle twitch that signaled her subvocal exchange with Maggy, or she was relying on her shaman’s espabilities.

“No,” admitted Tocohl. She tapped the implant. “My partner, the maggy-maggy lynn listens as well.”

Because she now spoke Yn, Tocohl used the my that signaled personal relationship rather than property, which in Yn culture included males as well. That was how she thought of Maggy, she realized, as both her partner and female. She had also translated lord into the Yn doubling, quite unintentionally giving her equal status with layli-layli herself. She made a mental note not to introduce Maggy as a demonstration of state-of-the-art after all.