David MacDonald heartily disliked the awkward commode they were expected to use. It was ill-suited for humans: a dry ceramic box perhaps sixteen inches high, and wide enough for two of the alien invaders to back up to at once. He sluiced it clean with the hose provided, then in lieu of paper, hosed his behind with a needle-spray setting. He wondered how the aliens managed to hose their rears. Probably they didn't, he decided. Their arms were too short. And horses got by without it, and dogs.
Fortunately, alien hygiene arrangements included soft soap in bowls, and he made use of it now. He didn't particularly like making a spectacle of himself for the multilens monitor that left no part of their cell unobserved. When they'd wakened on the shuttle that had brought them to this—station? ship?—they were naked. But of course their captors were naked too, except for equipment harness.
He looked at Yukiko, sitting cross-legged on the other side of the room on a sort of futon. Annika lay still and pale, her head cradled on his wife's lap. Yukiko stroked the girl's short, blond, cap-cut hair, crooning softly to her. That the savant had been captured told him that even with no exposed structures, the Cave Bay station had been discovered. Probably from its electronics signature. And the Cousteau had obviously not gotten offworld, because Annika would have been on it.
Ju-Li would have fought a squad of hyenas to protect her, so the others must be dead, he thought. Yukiko agreed. Probably Dennis had sent the others out hunting for them, when they all should have been headed outsystem in warpdrive.
David shook his head. He and Yukiko were together, and when they'd been put aboard the shuttle, Annika had been given into their care. If any of the others had been taken alive, it seemed to him they'd all be together. The only apparent alternative was for each human to be held in solitary, and obviously they weren't.
"How's she doing?" he asked.
"Fine," Yukiko answered. Her attention remained on Annika. "Just fine. Annika knows we're with her, taking care of her. Don't you, darling?" she crooned, and continued to stroke. "She's just resting her eyes. She looked at me a minute ago."
David didn't take his wife's words at face value. She'd said what she had at least partly to sooth Annika, reassure her. It might take quite a bit of that before the child came out of whatever state she was in: a coma or stupor—whatever. The child. It occurred to him he didn't know how old Annika was. Eleven or twelve, he guessed, but mentally equivalent to four or five. If "equivalent" meant anything in cases like this.
A sound caught David's attention, and he turned. The door was sliding open, and two aliens looked in from the corridor, sidearms in hand, long reptilian jaws closed. The eyes were squarely in front, presumably providing binocular vision.
The weapons, David guessed, were stunners of some sort. But not the variety familiar from crime dramas; he and Yukiko had been stunned while being picked up on the islet, and there'd been no hangover. "Look who's here," David said. "The hyena twins, Ugly and Uglier." His eyes were intent on their faces, which he could not read. But he got an impression of wariness, as unlikely as it seemed. The two walked through the door, then stepped aside. A third one, larger, walked in between them, seemingly unarmed. The first two were reddish brown. This one had vivid blue sides; the upright torso and head were teal blue. The face was marked with red, and the seemingly clipped crest was scarlet. To David's eyes the colors seemed natural. Its own eyes intent on David, the latecomer spoke, the words recognizable despite very approximate pronunciations. "How do you feel?" it said. The eff sound was approximate.
It's got no lips, David realized. The alien's eyes were on him, and for a moment David thought the creature wanted to know. But then it answered its own question. "I felt vetter."
Before he got it all out, the creature's gaze had moved to Yukiko. "How do you suffose I feel?" it said, then answered its own question. "Cratty." It looked from one human to the other, then made what might have been a smile, and touched its upright torso where its heart might might have been but almost certainly wasn't. "Qonits," it added. "Qonits!"
"Yukiko," Yukiko answered promptly, and touched her chest.
Ah-ha. It's begun, David thought. He remembered now: the first sentence had been what he'd asked Yukiko when she'd wakened—"How do you feel?"—and the follow-up had been her reply. "Cratty" was as close as their interrogator could come to "crappy." The aliens had been monitoring more than their movements. They'd recorded their words, run an audio analysis, then this one had practiced the Terran phonemes, words, and sentences. They wanted to learn the language.
The chain of realizations had been more rapid than speech; the oceanographer didn't miss a beat. "David," he said, touching his thatched chest.
It was indeed the beginning. There was a wall table in the room, its height suitable for an alien to work at, but too low for a standing human; David and Yukiko would have to kneel. Qonits stepped to it and gestured. Gently Yukiko laid Annika's head down on the futon, and whispered to her. Then she and David joined the alien, who promptly walked the four fingers of one hand along the table's surface, and made a sound. Probably the word for walk, David decided. He repeated it back as best he could, and walked two of his own fingers on the table, human-style. "Walk," he said.
The alien repeated the word he'd used, and both adult humans tried to duplicate it. The alien's eyes were unreadable. Again David's two human fingers walked along the table. "Walk!" he repeated, forcefully this time. "Walk! Walk!"
The alien tried it again, and David glowered deliberately, wondering what, if anything, the alien made of human facial expressions. Shaking his head, he galloped his fingers along the surface. "Run! Run! Run!" he barked.
The alien stared, appraisingly it seemed, then walked his fingers again. "Wahk," he said. "Wahk. Wahk."
David didn't let him get by with that. "Walk!" he snarled, "not wahk! You're not a duck, you're a goddamn . . . " He paused. "Hyena!"
When Qonits left, some while later, he'd learned not only run and walk, but hungry, eat, drink, scratch, wash, bathe, breathe, heart, urinate, and defecate. He could also count to ten. And considering the undoubted differences in his vocal apparatus, approximated the sounds rather well.
He'd also proven a quick study, which did not greatly cheer the oceanographer. David had no doubt the words were recorded in the ship's computer, but what it might make of them, he had no idea. Not much, he guessed. Not yet. It lacked the workhorse words: is and are and were; you and me; but and and; here and there . . . But it was a beginning. Meanwhile, he'd established a kind of fragile dominance, though what good it might be, he had no idea.