Pointing at herself and the body outline in the sketch, she said, “Human.” She repeated the gestures and the word several times before pointing at the spider and its outline and deliberately said nothing.
The silent questioning seemed to work because one of her captor’s clawlike digits moved down to touch the spider outline. It made a low, clicking and cheeping noise that sounded like, “Kritkuk.”
Ignoring the sketches, Murchison pointed at herself and then the spider, and repeated, “Human. Kritkuk.”
“Hukmaki,” it replied; and, more loudly, “Kritickuk.”
The emphasis on the second word, she thought, might be due to irritation at her not pronouncing it correctly. But it wasn’t doing such a hot job of pronunciation on “human,” either. She led a different approach, knowing that it couldn’t understand any of the words yet, but hoping that it would get the message. “You are speaking too quickly for me,” she said in her nor-
mal speaking tempo, then went on slowly, “Please . . . speak… in … a … slow … and . .. distinct… voice.”
Plainly it had understood the message because this time, while the word didn’t seem to be that much slower, she was able to detect additional syllables in it.
She started to say it but the word choked off into a cough. Taking a deep, calming breath she tried again.
“Krititkukik,” she repeated.
“Krititkukik,” it agreed.
Pleased at her first linguistic success, but not wanting to waste time trying to teach it better Earth-human pronunciation, she knelt down on the folded hammock and, with a new leaf spread flat on the deck before her, she thought hard and began sketching again.
Drawing two circles to indicate their different planets in space might be too confusing at this stage although, being a sailor, her spider would certainly use the stars for navigation between its world’s many islands and might be well aware of the fact that its surface was round. Instead she drew a straight line to represent the horizon across the widest part of a new leaf, placed a small circle with wavy lines radiating from it to indicate that it was the sun and added the outline of the island. Around and below it she drew small, flat crescent shapes to denote waves, and on one side of it she drew three flat domes to depict the spider’s ships and not to scale, a glider flying above them. She pointed to each of the symbols in turn.
“Sky,” she said. “Sun. Sea. Island. Ship. Glider.”
The spider supplied the equivalent word sounds, and a few of them she was even able to pronounce without being corrected, but the other began walking around her in a tight circle as if in agitation or impatience.
Suddenly it reached forward and took the brush from her hand and began slowly and carefully to add to her sketch. It drew three small, flat rectangles that had to be the buildings of the medical station on the other side of the island. It reversed the brush and used the dry end to point several times at the station.
She wasn’t giving away information that the spiders did not already know from their aerial reconnaissance and they would have been stupid if they did not already know that she had come from there, so she took another leaf and filled it with a drawing of the medical-station buildings in greater detail. She showed the sand below them sloping to the wavy lines of the sea and, on a clear area of sand, four stylized figures: herself; the cylindrical shape with many short legs along its base that was Naydrad; a featureless cone that was Danalta when it wasn’t being something else; and Prilicla. In outline the empath looked very much like Krititkukik except for the two sets of wings and the fact that it was a little distance above the ground. The spider remained motionless for the few seconds, either in surprise or because it was waiting for the ink to dry, then it pointed the brush first at Murchison herself, then used the end of its thin handle to touch her image in the sketch, followed by those of the others, and finally the station. It repeated the process, but this time when it touched each of the four figures it followed by touching the buildings, and ended by tapping repeatedly at the med station alone. Then it looked at her and made a chittering, interrogative sound.