Honor - Kevin Killiany [30]
“The truth?” Corsi demanded, as annoyed by the tone as the fact that her friend was talking nonsense. “What truth?”
“We share life,” Spot repeated. “We are one spirit.”
“Wait a minute. Say that again.”
Corsi turned off her combadge and heard Spot recite the same two phrases of clicks and ticks intoned by everyone she’d been introduced to on her first tour of the tree town. They had meant nothing then and they had no power now.
“The Tznauk’t have no universal translators,” she said when hers was back on. “They will not understand you.”
“We have been practicing their language,” Spot explained. “They taught it to many when they thought we were animals that mimicked sound.”
The young K’k’tict uttered two phrases of slurred sound. The universal translator could make nothing of them. Corsi could not tell if Spot had indeed spoken in the language of the invaders. Or, remembering the natives substituted tz for the s in her name, whether what she’d said would be intelligible to the Tznauk’t.
“That is what you are preparing for?” she asked. “To recite words in a foreign language to those who would kill you?”
“Oh, no,” Spot said. “We are preparing to die.”
Chapter
14
Bart Faulwell grinned as he listened to Fabian Stevens try to sway Carol Abramowitz and Soloman to his choice of lunch spots.
Actually, it would be lunch for Bart and Stevens. For Soloman it was breakfast time and Abramowitz was looking for a late dinner. While transporters made it possible for members of a globe-spanning effort to meet for a meal, they did nothing to simplify the choice of restaurants.
At the moment the four of them were strolling under a noonday sun in Trizist, a pleasant enough town though its only claim to fame was a single aqueduct junction just visible over the rooftops to the south. Plus a library stocked with reliable copies of scrolls from several neighboring towns lost to the Breen bombardment.
The local architecture had a square and stolid look, though the blocklike buildings were topped with upswept gables—perfectly balanced, of course—and incongruous bits of gingerbread. The absolute symmetry dulled the spontaneity a bit, but Bart still found the effect pleasantly whimsical.
He noticed he was the only one enjoying it. Stevens and Abramowitz were deep in their debate over restaurants and Soloman had his nose to a padd, evidently counting on his companions to keep him from banging into things.
Pleasant as the architecture and climate were, however, lunchtime fare in Trizist tended toward raw vegetables, jerked meat very similar to venison, and a stew thick with barley and simmered until it was almost solid. Having sampled it yesterday, Bart came away fairly certain he would choose it over survival rations, but it would be a near thing.
“There’s plenty of reasons for having lunch in Brohtz,” Stevens insisted, focusing his argument on the cultural specialist as the harder sell.
“There are?”
“Rastentha soufflé!”
“Again?” Bart shook his head at Stevens’s enthusiasm. “I think it’s time we gave rustic Brohtz a rest. The cuisine of Franthc is, I’m told, very like Earth Asian barbecue.”
“Sounds good,” Abramowitz said. “I’m in the mood for spicy. And we need to take another look at the southern hemisphere’s concept of lunar cycles anyway. I’m thinking there’s a fundamental disconnect between how they timed their lock cycles and the schedule employed in the north.”
Soloman’s head snapped up, his large eyes locked on the cultural specialist.
“That’s it.”
“What’s it?”
“A fundamental disconnect,” the Bynar said.
“I know,” Abramowitz said patiently. “We have to figure out how to resolve it.”
“You misunderstand.” Soloman turned his padd to show his companions, then realized the screen was too small for them to see clearly. He glanced about, but there were no display panels in the tourist area with which to interface. “If I could draw…” he murmured.
Bart offered him his folio, but the Bynar