Indira’s idle musings vanished as Joseph came near. Tears, she suddenly realized, were pouring from the boy’s eyes.
She rose to her feet hastily.
“What’s the matter?”
“There’s something wrong with one of the maia!” cried Joseph. “With Wolugo!”
She had time, before she started hurrying down the hillside, to wonder at Joseph’s use of the name “Wolugo.” Since they began playing with the maia, the children had begun imitating the creatures’ hoots. Over time, they became adept at producing the strange sounds. They even began mixing maia hoots into their own conversations.
The children began insisting that the hooting was a language. Excited, Julius had immediately experimented with his own attempts at hooting. But he had given up, after a few days, in total frustration.
“There’s no way I can do it,” he’d grumbled to Indira. “I had a hard enough time with Spanish, and if that hooting’s a language it’s totally unlike any language on Earth. Although I think it’s tonal, like Chinese.”
Then, snarling: “And if I have to listen to one more snotty little brat make fun of me, I’ll commit mass infanticide.”
Indira’s interest had been aroused. She herself, unlike Julius, had an extraordinary aptitude for languages. She was fluent in seven, including all four of the global tongues (English, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese), and could make her way fairly well in a number of others.
But when she tried learning “hoot,” she hit a brick wall. It did, in fact, remind her in a certain way of Chinese. (A very vague, generic, way.) But she couldn’t wrap her mind around any concepts. More than once, she felt she was on the edge of grasping the inner logic of the hoots. But, always, the moment slipped away.
In the end, she gave up. Had she been certain that the hoots were really a conscious language, she would have persevered to her last breath. But she was still not convinced that Julius was right.
The children, on the other hand, for all that they had teased Julius’ hopeless attempts at hooting, often expressed the opinion that—at least on the subject of the maia—Julius was the only adult in the colony who had any brains.
And for the past three months, the children had started referring to individual maia with proper names.
Even as she ran through the valley alongside Joseph, Indira could not help but smile at the memory of a conversation between the boy and Francis Adams the previous month.
Joseph had casually referred to one of the maia as “Yuloc.” Adams had smiled, in his condescending way, and remarked:
“Is that what you’ve decided to call it?”
Joseph had given the man a look which belied his years.
“Yuloc’s not an `it.’ She’s a she—like almost all of the maia are. And I didn’t give her the name. It’s her own.”
Then:
“People don’t decide what to call other people. You call them by their own names.”
“Is that so?” mocked Adams.
The next words, coming from a six-year-old, had astonished her.
“Yes, Francis, it is.”
Adams shot to his feet like a rocket.
“You will call me Doctor Adams, young man!”
Joseph had said nothing. He had simply stared back, and up, at the man looming over him. Without a trace of fear or cringing, his face filled with a dignity she would never have imagined possible in a boy that age.
Gasping for breath, she and Joseph reached the spot in the valley where the boy was leading her. As she drew near, she saw that a large number of maia, and what looked like every child in the colony, were clustered near a grove of tubular, fleshy plants. She recognized the plants. They were the favorite food of the maia. The humans had called it “sortasaguaro,” until, beginning a few months earlier, the children had started calling it “oruc,” insisting that that was the proper name for the plant according to the maia. Julius immediately adopted the name, with the other adults eventually following suit.
She edged her way through the throng. At the center, she came upon a pitiable tableau. One of the maia had collapsed. The creature was lying on its side, hooting softly. Indira immediately knew the position was unnatural. She had never seen a maia lying on its side before. When the creatures slept, they simply lowered themselves straight to the ground.