nutrition. Flandry spent the bulk of his time getting back into physical
shape and oriented about this planet. Reasonably reconciled with
Djana–who’d been caught in the fortunes of war, he thought, and who now
did everything she could to mollify her solitary fellow human–she made
his nights remarkably pleasant. In general, aside from being a captive
whose fate was uncertain and from having run out of tobacco, he found
his stay diverting.
Nor was she badly off. She had little to fear, perhaps much to gain. If
she never returned to the Empire, well, that was no particular loss when
other humans lived under the Roidhunate. Like a cat that has landed on
its feet, she set about studying her new environment. This involved long
conversations with the thirty-plus members of Ydwyr’s group. She had no
Merseian language except for the standard loan words, and none of her
hosts had more than the sketchiest Anglic. But they kept a translating
computer for use with the natives. The memory bank of such a device
regularly included the major tongues of known space.
She’ll make out, Flandry decided. Her kind always does, right up to the
hour of the asp.
Then Ydwyr offered him a chance to accompany a party bound for Seething
Springs. He jumped at it, both from curiosity and from pragmatism. If he
was to be a quasi-slave, he might have a worse master; he must therefore
see about pleasing the better one. Moreover, he had not inwardly
surrendered hope of gaining his freedom, to which end anything he
learned might prove useful.
Half a dozen Merseians were in the expedition. “It’s fairly ordinary
procedure, but should be stimulating,” said Cnif hu Vanden,
xenophysiologist, who had gotten friendliest with him. “The Domrath are
staging their fall move to hibernating grounds–in the case of this
particular group, from Seething Springs to Mt. Thunderbelow. We’ve never
observed it among them, and they do have summertime customs that don’t
occur elsewhere, so maybe their migration has special features too.” He
gusted a sigh. “This pouchful of us … to fathom an entire world!”
“I know,” Flandry answered. “I’ve heard my own scholarly acquaintances
groan about getting funds.” He spread his hands. “Well, what do you
expect? As you say: an entire world. It took our races till practically
yesterday to begin to understand their home planets. And now, when we
have I don’t know how many to walk on if we know the way–”
Cnif was typical of the problem, crossed his mind. The stout, yellowish,
slightly flat-faced male belonged to no Vach; his ancestors before
unification had lived in the southern hemisphere of Merseia, in the
Republic of Lafdigu, and to this day their descendants maintained
peculiarities of dress and custom, their old language and many of their
old laws. But Cnif was born in a colony; he had not seen the mother
world until he came there for advanced education, and many of its ways
were strange to him.
The bus glided forward. The first valve of the hangar heatlock closed
behind it, the second opened, and it climbed with a purr of motor and
whistle of wind. At 5000 meters it leveled off and bore north-northeast.
That course by and large followed the river. Mainly the passengers sat
mute, preparing their kits or thinking their thoughts. Merseians never
chattered like humans. But Cnif pointed out landmarks through the
windows.
“See, behind us, at the estuary, what we call Barrier Bay. In early
winter it becomes choked with icebergs and floes, left by the receding
waters. When they melt in spring, the turbulance and flooding is
unbelievable.”
The steam wound like a somnolent snake through the myriad blues of
jungle. “We call it the Golden River in spite of its being silt-brown.
Auriferous sands, you see, washed down from the mountains. Most of the
place names are unavoidably ours. Some are crude translations from
Domrath terms. The Ruadrath don’t have place names in our sense, which
is why we seldom borrow from them.”
Cnif’s words for the aborigine& were artificial. They had to be. “Dom”
did represent an attempt at pronouncing what one of the first
communities encountered called themselves; but “-rath” was an Eriau root