Koban: Rise of the Kobani (56 page)

“Is it safe for us to get out with you, or should we let you introduce us first?”

“The Torki are not shy, or normally aggressive, and I have never seen them act surprised. I see no reason for you not to step out with me. There is no doubt this is not a Krall craft, and they will be able to see Marlyn as the pilot. They have very good vision because their top eyes are large, and they can separate them or bring them together to focus near or far. They have other smaller eyes under the front of their shells as well.”

Maggi noted that the little Prada had again used the name Krall, rather than Ruler, something he had done more frequently in the last several days.

Marlyn eased the shuttle inland, down the center of the open strip of beach, keeping high enough to minimize the sand being blown around. She then quickly throttled back and settled fast with as little sand blasting as she could manage, and quickly shut off the thrusters.

Maggi took her hand set radio from her waist belt, and activated its transducer interface, checking to be sure it could Link through the shuttle radio to Kap on the Beagle. This was being recorded, Tri-Vid and audio, and there were many interested eyes and ears at the other end.

“Everyone Link with me, so we all hear what is going on. Kap will be trying to translate if we hear a different language than low Krall. I’ll be unarmed as before.”

Looking over at her young bodyguard holding the 50-caliber rifle, she grinned. “Bradley, leave that cannon just inside the open hatch within reach. You have two pistols as does Marlyn and Hakeem. Thanks to Wister’s information, we have no reason to expect a hostile reception.” Wister’s head darted forward to indicate agreement.

Marlyn, at the rear hatch, reached up and keyed it to open. As it rose, they heard the breeze, and the chittering of chitin as claws clicked, and shells rubbed or scraped. As the hatch revealed the humans fully, the sound increased, the small claw waving increased, and the nearest of the giant crabs lowered its front carapace almost to the sand, as if bowing.

“Wister, are we supposed to react some way to that display?” Maggi asked him in a low voice.

“I don’t know.” He answered, equally low. “I have never seen one of them do that. Even to the Rulers.”

The same Torki directly to their front, about thirty feet away, answered, proving they had excellent hearing as well. In perfect base pitched low Krall, sounding as if it came from a Krall clan leader, the crab clearly said, “We do not greet the Krall this way, and they are not our Rulers, but our masters. They do not deserve welcome.  These other world visitors are welcome. The Prada, Wister, is also accepted.” The Torki raised its carapace to level.

Maggi made a deep bow, and the other people in the party quickly followed her lead. Wister shook his head sideways in uncertainty. As she raised her head she said, “I return your welcome. I was told that any Torki is able to speak for all of the Torki present. Will that one be you?”

“It will be me, for now. I have the voice for all of the adults present,” it answered.

“My people are called humans, we speak as individuals, and I am the one chosen to speak first. My name is Maggi Fisher. Should I know your name to address you?”

“Lacking a shell or claws, I do not think you have the means to click-hiss our names in our language. However, my sound replicator can reproduce all of the frequencies of Krall speech, and those of yours that I have heard. A low Krall word you may use for my name is Coldar, because that means quantum key, which is something that I often build. I believe your use of low Krall speech indicates you can make that sound.”

Now that the Torki had lifted its front, Maggi saw that there was a black, nearly flat oval object, about six inches across adhered to the underside of its front shell. The object seemed to be the source of the voice she heard. Many of the other Torki had an identical black object on their shells, but in slightly different locations. There appeared to be intricate mouthparts, with numerous small mandibles and pincher equipped limbs around it, which did not move in a fashion that seemed related to the sounds. She also saw four black dots near the mouth that could be the small fixed eyes, which Wister said they had on their underside. Coldar did call it his sound
replicator
.

“I can speak the name ‘Coldar,’ although we are interested in learning your language, even if unable to speak it ourselves. We too have sound replicators that can reproduce what we cannot speak.”

“We have detected electromagnetic signals between each of you, and a distant communicator. Is that a leader or a recording device?”

“Coldar, our leader on this expedition to this world is with me, her name is Marlyn Greeves.” Maggi indicated Marlyn, and then introduced each of the others with her.

“There are too many of us to introduce if we are to have a discussion today.” Coldar suggested. “Is this a breach of your custom to not say a name for all that will participate?”

Maggi smiled, certain the gesture had no meaning to the Torki. “No, I only introduced my fellow visitors because we are few, and that could be done quickly. The sounds for their names are obviously in our own language, called Standard, and not the low Krall language. The words themselves do not have a meaning, such as a builder of anything.”

“That is much as the Prada take names, so it is familiar to us. You use two names, is that like the Krall, when they earn more names or titles by what they accomplish?”

“No, our personal names are given to us by our parents, and some of us earn titles to go with our names, by what we learn or accomplish.”

  “I have had fertilized millions of eggs.” Coldar responded. “Most adult male Torki have done so, and our females produce millions of eggs, which receive no names as new larvae, and we do not know which ones are our own children when they return. They find a name for themselves.” It waved its smaller left claw (still almost three feet long) at several pale, almost translucent shelled smaller replicas of the adults, off to its left side.

Maggi noted the early tint of the adult coloration was present in them, but she could see organs faintly, through the soft looking shells. Each of them had a dark looking angular object near the place between their upper eyestalks. It seemed artificial.

She suddenly noticed that Coldar’s eyestalks had dropped and one was looking directly at her, the other towards the Torkedia she happened to be observing.

Worried that she might have done something inappropriate by staring, she quickly looked back at Coldar.

Far from offended, he answered her unasked question. “You can see the Olt’s, our mind enhancers in our returned Torkedia. They are able to learn from the adults now, and have all of our libraries for reference. They are able to listen to us today, but do not yet speak with language. This is our gift from the old ones, who first helped the Torki become aware.”

Maggi looked at Wister and the others, before asking the question that came to mind. The Prada’s head was doing its side-to-side motion, an indication it was confused or unsettled. Old ones could have meant older Torki, until he said they helped them become aware. Marlyn and Hakeem looked puzzled, but they too had caught the reference to awareness. Bradley just nodded.

“Who were the old ones that gave the Torki this gift?”

“The Olt’kitapi, before we were fully aware and intelligent, gave them to us. The old ones were gone before the gifts had done their work, to make us a united people. We make Olts for ourselves now, because they have the instructions in them to make more. It is how we join the minds of all Torki together, to know what all think. It is where our young have the knowledge of all that came before stored, for them to find and learn. One of the first tasks for an adult, after the color molt, is to start work on making a duplicate quantum storage device, a new Olt, using the one in our heads as a reference tool.” 

Wister was pulling his head back now, in a sharp negation signal. Coldar noted the gesture.

“The Prada do not accept that we knew the Olt’kitapi in the youth of our species. We were nearly mindless Torkada, on the beaches of our home world before they came. They slowly lifted us, to reach the promise they saw for our species. We usually eat our own dead, and that was how the Olt’kitapi discovered the way to pass knowledge from elders to our returning young Torkedia.

“The Olt, which we named after the species that gave it to us, is a partly organic quantum storage device. I have my Olt from my own return as a Torkedia, located where you see it in these young ones, acquired the traditional way, when an adult had died and I ate of the body. It migrated to where my optic nerves enter my brain. I have a second inactive Olt inside of me, which I made through years of effort, and it is now placed in the muscles along my back. A place where the hungry young Torkedia will find it in my body when I die, as well as the one in my brain. Inside my body, I have the seeds for two young adults to learn all of our knowledge. We can also make new Olts to feed to the returning young ones if no adult dies before they must make the color molt, into the first adult form.”

Maggi looked at Wister. “You have heard their story before?”

“Yes, all of the Prada know this tale. It does not make them older than the Krall, even if they started their own path sooner. They did not become aware and finish as quickly as the Rulers.”

Coldar used his two claws, spreading them wide as the pointed tips made a spiral twirling motion. It apparently signified overall agreement with Wister, when he offered his explanation.

“The process to become fully aware, and to learn what the Olt really was, and what it contained, required many generations of slowly increasing awareness and learning. Until some thousands of years later, one of us suddenly was able to access more of the knowledge that the Olt contained. Perhaps that forgotten one of our race had reached some level of intelligence, or some other mark the Olt’kitapi had set long ago, to allow him greater access.

“After that, every Torki that the first fully aware mind of our kind met also found new access to a hidden library of information in their Olt. From that time, we flowered into a real civilization, and every new adult Torki had this gift of knowledge when they ingested an Olt.

“We do not know how long after the Olt’kitapi gave us millions of the original Olts before this happened. We only know that our benefactors were gone, and we had a hint of who they were within our Olts. They did not ask for thanks or for anything at all from us. They helped the Raspani in a similar way, and were apparently trying to help the Krall when their peaceful and trusting nature became their downfall.

“The Prada are correct, the Krall were farther along their ‘Great Path’ than the Torki were on our march to civilization, when they destroyed our mutual benefactors.

“Had our home world, and its early colonies, not been so far from the space the Olt’kitapi had settled, we would not be alive now. Undeveloped, we would not have been of use to the Krall at the time they conquered the Olt’kitapi, and killed the other near-neighbor species.

“Like the Prada do now, we agreed to make things for them that they needed. We are guilty o
f staying alive by building weapons for them, to kill others, and then stealing what the dead races knew, and providing that knowledge which the Krall wanted to keep.”

“Your Olt devices allow you to share thoughts?” Maggi wondered how much this resembled contact telepathy.

“It does not permit us to converse as you and I do right now, or to share ideas or thoughts. The combined signals of a population renders a sense in each of us of what the majority favors, even if we individually do not share that group feeling. Not all of us wanted to come out to greet you. Many fear you could be more dangerous than the Krall. Yet the group feeling brought all but the sick or injured out to wait for you.”

Marlyn couldn’t hold back. “You knew we were coming here? That’s why you were all out on the beach? How did you know?”

Coldar aimed both eyestalks at Maggi. “Maggi Fisher, you said you are chosen as first to speak. Is it proper that I answer her question?”

“Yes, of course. I wish to know this as well.”

“We monitored energy bursts for arriving space craft. We know well the range of energies of all of the craft the Krall use. Clanships, and the huge ships we Torki created for our travel in space, which the Krall now use to move both Torki and Prada from one world to another, are the most common. We detected new energies of a few arriving ships, starting twenty-six orbits ago, that were not normal Krall ships. Then after the last fleet of Krall clanships were seen arriving here twenty-two orbits ago, followed by a long silence, we knew they had left this star system.”

Marlyn nodded, another meaningless gesture to a hard-bodied crab, and told him of the Krall pull out, and their new war on humanity’s worlds.

“However, we also sensed radio, radar, and laser signals from the heavy world next out from the star, where the Krall previously chose most often to live. This was after we knew the Krall had left this system. Therefore, someone not Krall was alive there and curious. In the last year, there have been new clanship movements, but only the first one behaved like the Krall do. They are not curious. We sensed your movements around the planets here, movements centered at the neighbor world, where you said you now live. We listened to your radio signals, and heard an unknown language.”