“Exactly,” Misra said with great satisfaction.
“I must contact my heir immediately. …”
“You have six minutes before the Shield goes up.”
For the first time in his life, Hafiz wondered if the Shield, which had cost so much and had been kept so secret, would prove sufficient to the need. As soon as he sent a message to Rafik, he would initiate his own special invasion procedures. They would have been sufficient against any known hazard, but he didn’t like the look of these new predators. Especially if the little Horn ship had felt obliged to warn any other sapient species it encountered.
Why could he not remember the few words that Acorna had said to him in her own language?
“Ah!” Now they came floating back to him. “Awi,” she had cried in her sleep once. “Awi, Lalli…”
“Misra, I must speak to these Horned Ones!”
“Why? Have you suddenly a method of learning their language unknown to us?”
“For once, Methusalitic relic of a thousand of an era no longer even understood, stop asking questions! PATCH ME THROUGH!”
If the beauty of the four obviously mature specimens of Acorna’s species startled Hafiz, they were dumbfounded to hear him use the two words of their language that he knew.
“Aavi,” one of them repeated, giving the word a slightly different emphasis that made her sound exactly like Acorna. “Laali?” Then, blast it, she started chattering their gibberish at high speed.
“What is she saying, what is she saying?” demanded Misra.
“I have no idea,” said Hafiz, although in fact he was pretty sure she was saying the Horned Ones’ equivalent of “Praise to Allah, at last someone who speaks a civilized language!”
That attempt at communication had backfired, but at least he had a vid of Acorna to show, taken secretly two years ago -when she had visited him, and kept by Hafiz for his private enjoyment. When he displayed the pictures of young Acorna romping on the grass and dancing to her own music on the Singing Stones of Skarness, he saw the amazement of the envoys increase. They fell silent, but their moving eyes and animated gestures indicated that a lively discussion was going on. Why could he not hear it? Oh, well, what difference would it make if he could? He wouldn’t have understood what they were saying anyway.
When he also produced the graphic of the inscription on her escape pod, they became so agitated that he wondered if he had turned the information about Acorna over to the wrong sort of Horned Ones.
Hafiz had never been good with charades as a method of communication, but he had the sense to record the movements: the blunt two-jointed hands mimicked a small member of their species, then outspread and uplifted arms and a universally understood expression of query.
In response he nodded, smiled, and gestured to the latest height of Acorna to indicate her maturity.
Then they obviously were trying to extract from him her current location, showing him star maps and pointing urgently at them. They spoke all the time in their own liquid language, slightly nasal, as Acorna’s Basic was, but he was totally out of his depth. He’d always left navigation to his highly trained space crew and wished desperately that he had Rafik to hand just then.
A chance look at the timepiece showed him he had little time to fool with gestures and expressions. He compressed their interview into a message cube, slotted it in with the Uhuru’s code, and sent it off. No sooner had he done that than a great shadow seemed to float through the window and over his house. The Shield had been put in place.
Lost was any contact with the courier ship, and he could not be certain that the message had made it through that device and on to Rafik.
“Well,” Misra’s acid voice now violated his ears, “did you find out anything?”
“If I did, that damned Shield, ten thousand djinnis fly away with it and drop it into the hell of molten rock, may have prevented it getting through to where this information will be most valuable. Rafik HAS to have that information.”