“Aari, buddy, what happened here? What happened to you?
“Khieevi,” he said, and then made motions where his horn should have been that made Becker want to vomit again, only there was nothing there to vomit, just as there was nothing more on Aari’s forehead for anyone to torture him with.
“How in the hell did you get away? How did you survive?” Becker asked.
“Vhiliinyar,” was the only Linyaari word Becker heard and then, the funny thing was, he sort of understood the rest of what had happened without actually being aware of anything Aari was saying. At first he thought that the universal translator gadget 4W actually working both ways, and then something made him realize that he and Aari were reading each other’s minds-and a third mind as well.
RK very carefully sunk a single claw into Becker’s leg and Becker knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that RK could hear and understand the thoughts of both of them and could have transmitted thoughts, too, if he’d wanted to. The cat just preferred body language. As far as he could see, RK wanted Becker to try to learn Cat. It was beneath a cat’s dignity to speak human Standard, Becker figured. Then it hit him.
“Hey, you’re telepathic! And so are we, when we’re with you!
Aari shook his head and picked up one of the horns, then made a sweeping motion with his hands, and an exchanging motion between his head, Becker’s and RK’s. Then he pointed to his own forehead, made a negative swipe with his hand, and hung his head.
“So we understand each other telepathically because of the horns, huh?” Becker asked.
Aari sighed deeply, shook his head to indicate that wasn’t the case, shrugged, and looked perplexed. RK sunk his claw into Becker’s leg again and fixed him with another stare, which to Becker’s somewhat rattled brain seemed to say that RK had been reading his mind all along; he just didn’t much care what Becker thought. Becker guessed he was reading the cat because-well, he had always read the cat, really, but now he had nothing better to do so he noticed.
Aari smiled a little, and Becker could tell the Linyaari was reading him. Aari projected a few careful images that showed him with his horn, communing wordlessly with other people that looked just like him. So, he had been telepathic when he had his own horn. Fair enough.
Becker didn’t ask again what had happened to the guy’s horn but Aari grimly showed them how it had been when the Khieevi were about to finish him off and, having broken his body, excised his horn in a particularly slow and painful way. He backtracked to show them how he had been captured. Aari had stayed behind during the Khieevi invasion to help his brother, who had been stuck in this cave, badly injured, too far away from the spaceport for them to get help from the ships departing with all of their people during the great evacuation. Aari had been unable to reach him in time to heal him.
The Khieevi had captured Aari when he was out gathering rope for the rescue, and had begun long, long tortures of their captive, all the time probing, probing, as if trying to feast on his grief. They had captured some of the translator boxes from previous diplomatic missions-LAANYE, Aari called them-and used them to communicate with him, to interrogate him, though they surely learned little that could be of help to them. What he knew that they might have wished to know, he never told.
Aari did not speak of his brother, or of the new planet his people had found. The foremost thoughts in his mind were grief. His brother would be dead from his wounds by now, so he grieved, and grieved more as the Khieevi destroyed him, along with his planet. He grieved for the loss of his people, for the simultaneous destruction of his own body and the body of his home world, grieved at the pain, and the memories of better times. And all the time the Khieevi stood by jeering and gloating over their methodical ravaging of the beauty and life force of a planet and one of its children, the only one within their grasp.