“Hooo Hooo Hooo Hooo! OOOoohoohooohoo! You really do appear that way! Pardon, I mean, look like that—when surprised.”
“You speak English?!” I finally got out, rattled enough to slide into dialect. “What th’ hell’s goin’ on here? Weren’t four hours ago I first heard a word of your language, an’ from their reactions I’d thought was the first time y’all had heard ours!”
That sent him into another fit of laughter. Jodi and I exchanged glances. This wasn’t even vaguely what we’d expected. It didn’t help that I actually recognized the voice. Well, not really recognized it, exactly, but I knew I’d heard that voice before many times.
Finally he settled down. “In a way, you are quite right. And in another way, no, I do not speak your language. That”—he gestured to the twisted structure behind him—”speaks your language, through me.”
That brought all sorts of icky possibilities to mind, just looking at the thing.
“Are you the ruler here, or is it?”
The shrieking snort seemed equal parts amusement and annoyance. “I am the High Spirit here. That is a . . .” He seemed at a loss, finally saying, “makatdireskovi. There are several words in your language which seem to partly apply, none of them actually meaning what I am trying to say.”
“So what do you mean by saying you hadn’t heard our language before?” Jodi asked.
“Never before have we heard your voices speaking in our manner,” the Nome King—well, High Spirit—said. “But there were those of us who ventured into Tennatu—the Land of Fast Changes—who, in past cycles, began to turan certain signals which we realized were not natural. We made this makatdireskovi to help us understand what we sensed, and eventually did. But we never realized it was your people who were doing the speaking.”
It took some considerable back-and-forth exchanges before we finally realized that they’d managed, over a period of many years, to derive our language from television broadcasts. That explained the voice—it was a combination of several TV anchormen, most notably Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, with a hint of Walter Cronkite. They had realized that part of the transmissions could represent a depiction of objects in some way. But because they didn’t see at all the way we did, and within their own “sight” spectrum had a different arrangement of seeing intensities and “colors,” they could translate the signal but the “image” they got did not resemble the “image” their regular senses got of us at all. So they had no idea that the babbling in the air came from the same people that sometimes raided their caverns. That was also why it had taken the King several moments to verify that we really did look “surprised” in the same way as the images they had previously extracted from the signals. The makatdireskovi and he had needed to find the translation between the signal-images and what he was seeing.
“Okay,” I said finally, realizing how much time had passed, “I think we need to at least cover a little business before we go back to this discussion, sir. We came down here to see if we could try to fix up the bad blood that’s been built up between us over the years.”
He sat still for a moment, head tilting in that birdlike fashion again, and then gave a nod. The gesture was clearly deliberate, something he must have learned from the transmissions they monitored. “I had hoped this was true. You do not seem to be suicidal or hostile, despite the formidable reputation you have among my people. What do you propose?”
“Well, first off, you’ve got us in your power, so if you’d be so kind as to pull your people back off our land topside, and then I can tell my folks to relax—that we’re talkin’?”
He considered that for a moment, then raised his staff and barked out several commands in their own language. “It is done. Tell your people that mine shall bother them no more, at least so long as we remain in council.”
I keyed up the mike. “Father?”
He responded instantly, even though it must’ve been a good hour and a half, maybe two hours of nothing but waiting before he heard anything. “Yes, Clint?”