Laria reined Saki in at the curve, to let Tip and Hgf catch up.
She deliberately kept her eyes forward, curbing Saki’s intention to gallop up the last hill to home, because she knew the `dinis would have dropped to four legs to make the steep climb. Tip and Hgf were awfully sensitive about being caught on all fours. Like humans, the Mrdinis assumed bipedal stance as soon as their back muscles were well enough developed to support the long trunk.
Her father said that he thought the `dinis had been much relieved to learn that human children also had to learn how to walk upright.
When Saki’s twitching ears and a waft of a musky leathery scent on the breeze announced their arrival, she acknowledged them with a whistle/click.
She couldn’t quite make the sound as well as her brothers Thian and Rojer, but she did better than Zara who hadn’t the hang of it at all yet. Kaltia wasn’t even trying though she signed well enough to be understood by the `dinis as Morag did. Her youngest siblings, Ewain and Petra, were too young to have more than the most rudimentary contact with their pairs.
Despite saddlebags full of the day’s catch, Saki marched vigorously uphill, careful not to tread on the flipper feet on either side of her. Tip and Huf – which were Laria’s mental tag for her `dinis had taken holds on Laria’s stirrups to assist them up this steepest part of the climb. Well accustomed to hauling `dinis, Saki accepted the additional burden.
Dropping the reins now that Saki was behaving, Laria had hands free to sign to her companions in excitement over their success hunting. They’d never hear her well enough over the clopping of Saki’s hoofbeats if she spoke aloud. Tip and Hgf clicked and clacked happy sounds which echoed in their skulls. They could produce any number of identifiable noises that way, ranging from fear to bravado, agreement, dislike, curiosity, concern, enjoyment and what passed for `Dini laughter.
Neither species could quite manage the varied sounds needed to reproduce the subtler nuances of the other’s speech but human body language could add emphasis words and so could `Dini body movements.
Their five fingers were as dextrous in reproducing arbitrary patterns as their oral cavities were in producing understandable, pitched noises that humans could copy. Both languages, as spoken by the other species, were refined to somewhat limited vocabularies that fortunately could be extended into quite a few technical areas: such as space travel, basic engine design, biological and meteorological sciences, metallurgy and mining.
Laria’s mother and father, Damia and Afra Raven Lyon, had spent the past fifteen years developing and refining this communications bridge apart from the Dreamings – with Mrdini colleagues. Laria had been the earliest human test subject. Constantly surrounded from birth by adult Mrdinis, and then young Tip and Huf, she had absorbed posture and sounds just as any child learns another language from early exposure.
By the time she was six months old, she had had Tip and Hgf as cribmates and had dreamed the pleasantest dreams in their company at naptime and at night. All the Raven-Lyon offspring had been similarly paired when they were six months old with `Dini young.
On Iota Aurigae, such partnering had become normal. Even before much interspecies communIcation had become viable, miners – who were so overworked they were glad of any assistance – had taken adult pairs of `dinis into the pits and shafts when the Mrdinis had `dreamed’ their willingness to do so. The tough and suspicious Aurigaean miners had discovered that the `dinis were instinctive colliers, hard workers, and unusually strong.
`Hey-YO,’ cried someone behind her. Turning, Laria saw her brother Thian, his white lock flopping across his face, on his chunky black pony, Charger, round the bend, Mrg and Dpl trudging along beside him.
Not for the first time did Laria regret that the conformation of the `Dini made it impossible for them, with their stout short legs and stumpy tail, to straddle the hardy little Denebian hybrid ponies that humans employed. When they were younger, she’d occasionally put Tip and Huf up on Saki, Tip in front where she could hold on to it, and Huf riding pillion behind, its fingers latched tightly to her belt. But it wasn’t the most comfortable way to travel and now her mates were too heavy to ride Saki with her.