As they neared the building, Indira began to spot owoc and gukuy moving about. There were not many of them, and they were not engaged in the “dance” which Joseph had described. (Which, she now suspected, was some kind of religious ritual.) The handful of owoc she could see were scattered about, browsing on patches of oruc. The gukuy—she counted three of them—were all clustered in a field of upunu. Now that she was closer, she could see that the field had a cultivated look about it. Yet there was something odd about its appearance, which nagged at her memory until recognition came.
That field’s absolutely infested with uduwo snails. Why don’t they do something about them?
(It was not until later that she remembered what Julius had told her. The beaks of the gukuy were adapted for eating meat, not vegetation. The gukuy cultivated upunu fields not for the plants themselves but for the snails which fed on them.)
Indira now began rehearsing her speech of peace and well-wishes. Halfway through the rehearsal, the speech became a moot point.
The owoc, it turned out, had their own ideas on proper social behavior.
Suddenly, the four owoc with them began hooting loudly. Kupu’s hoots were especially deafening.
Immediately, the owoc and the gukuy in the valley stopped what they were doing and looked up.
Within a few seconds, hoots were being exchanged back and forth between the owoc on the slope and the owoc in the valley. Indira understood the hoots of her owoc companions—poetic variations, basically, on the general theme of “howdy.” She could almost understand the hoots which came in return.
It’s a different dialect. But I don’t think—a sigh of relief—that it’s a separate language.
At first, the gukuy observing the scene showed no reaction but a mild mottling in their mantles. Green, Indira noted with relief. But then they spotted the humans; and their mantles turned, in an instant, scarlet and ochre.
Fear. Indecision. What frightening creatures we must appear to them. Nothing on this planet looks remotely like human beings.
The owoc in the valley seemed totally unconcerned about the humans (whom they had certainly spotted, at this distance). The beings were lumbering toward the interlopers, issuing hoots which Indira could generically recognize as happy greetings. And their mantles were now solid green, untouched by even a trace of any other color.
But the three gukuy in the upunu field suddenly broke and raced toward the “temple,” whistling loudly. A moment later, four other gukuy emerged from the building. A rapid exchange of sounds and whistles.
Everything seemed to be happening at once. By now, the two groups of owoc had met and were beginning to intermingle. Formality, Indira noted, did not seem to be a prominent feature of owoc culture. But her attention, for the moment, was on the temple.
A moment later, as she had feared, the seven gukuy in the temple re-emerged and began hurrying toward them.
Bearing weapons. The same type which the raiders had carried—those stone-tipped whips and long-spiked morning stars. (Flails and forks, the gukuy called them, as she would learn later.) And as they neared, she saw that blue was beginning to ripple in their mantles. Blue was a color rarely seen in the mantles of owoc.
Rage.
She saw the other humans in her party grow stiff and tense. Suddenly, at Joseph’s command, the youngsters—
They’re not youngsters anymore, you damn fool! They’re warriors, and if you don’t think fast they’re going to react like warriors.
—reversed their grip on the spears.
Indira sighed with relief. Until she remembered that the grip which holds a spear in the point-down position of peace is the same one used to hurl it. And each of the—warriors—was carrying three spears.
She had not paid much attention to the military exercises, but she knew enough to know that Joseph had trained his people to start an attack with a cast of spears.
“Joseph!”
The youth did not look at her; his eyes remained fixed on the approaching gukuy. But he gestured with his hand, in a manner which simultaneously conveyed acknowledgement and surety. Then, when the gukuy were no more than thirty meters away, he hooted loudly: