As, eventually, it was. Lutha was washing her face when the others returned.
“There were five big Rottens,” Leelson told her. “They found the dead shaggy. It seemed to upset them a good deal.”
Lutha turned, the wet cloth still in her hand. “Why be upset at one dead one? Millions of them tore each other apart this morning!”
Leelson made an equivocal gesture. “I know. The Rottens paid no attention to the piles on the shore, but they did hover over the dying shaggy. One of them touched it, then they all drew in their tentacles and made pictures at it.”
His voice held a hint of strain, of puzzlement.
“What is it, Leelson?”
“They grieved, Lutha. I could feel it. The one there on the slope, it has an identity. It has a name. They called it by name.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a name as such,” she suggested. “Maybe it was a classification. A label, like little one, or child.”
“It was a name,” he said. “I could feel the grief, the pattern in it, singularity addressing singularity. If it wasn’t a name, what was it?”
Lutha folded the cloth and put it away. “How could it have a name? There were millions of the damned things in the vortex; there are still hundreds of thousands of them. Do ants have names, or bees?”
“Numbers aren’t really the issue,” said the ex-king. “There are billions and billions of men. We all have names.”
Lutha flushed. He was right. Given the Firster attitude toward animals, however, how awkward for them to have names!
A point that Leelson made at once. “They aren’t men, damn it. I suppose it’s possible there might be a kinship with some sensory way of identifying members of their own group. I wonder how we’d … ”
Lutha sat down on the nearest rock. “You said the Rottens made pictures to the dying one. It would help to know pictures of what?”
“We couldn’t see,” Snark replied. “We were looking down at the beach, and the angle was wrong. I just knew that’s what they were doing, making pictures at the dying one.”
“If you could have seen the pictures, you might have caught some clue to the language.”
“Ants and bees communicate,” said Mitigan. “But we don’t call it a language. Only men have language!”
Jiacare Lostre challenged this in his usual mild manner. “Oh, mighty warrior, it has to be a language.” He put up a hand as Mitigan growled. “Hear me out! Didn’t the Ularians arrange this world for the benefit of the shaggies? Don’t we assume the shaggies are the offspring of the Ularians? Wasn’t it a Ularian who went to the people of Breadh to tempt them away from their former home? Didn’t that tempter need language to do so? Am I the only one here surprised at our not having been killed or transported by the Ularians, since, according to the Alliance, that’s what Ularians do.”
Snark disagreed. “The tempter wasn’t the same! If Ularians are the same as the tempter on Breadh, then the Rottens are not Ularians. The tempter was mighty and mysterious, wonderful and terrible, so my mother said. He wasn’t a blob that made people drool all down their chins while they listened.”
Leelson murmured, “Or, if both Rottens and tempter are Ularian, then tempter is some kind of ultimate Ularian, some other race, or evolved type.”
Jiacare rubbed his hands together thoughtfully. “An ultimate Ularian. Interesting thought. And both you and Saluez are sure about this tempter?”
Snark nodded in vehement agreement. “The sisterhoods on Dinadh kept alive a lot of the old forbidden stories and songs. The original sisterhood, so my mother said, was made up of women who actually remembered what happened on Breadh.”
“So”—the ex-king threw his arms wide—”if the Rottens aren’t Ularians, where are the Ularians?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Lutha. “If Snark is right, then the ones here are just … nannies. Caretakers. They fret over a sick or dying shaggy; they come and go, minding the young; but they don’t or can’t clear planets or transport humans. What we call a Ularian crisis, from our point of view, may be just nannies tidying up, from the Ularian point of view.”