Expedition, Estimation, and Other Dangerous Pastimes, Chapter ten (Patreon)

Mora and the eldest Grandmother were in the temple when Liam and Ondry arrived. Liam tried to straighten his shoulders and project a calm and competence he didn’t feel. Until Ondry had gone sniffing him, Liam had been living in denial when it came to any fears. If he was going to attribute his bad mood to something, it would have been aggravation over Ondry’s secret keeping. However, the second Ondry had asked about Liam’s fears, it was like a fairy tale where naming a monster made it more real. And now Ondry was hovering like a silent bodyguard or a stalker. He might be stalking Liam, and he definitely had a nictel in his pocket.

Mora came bouncing over. He was so excited that Duke was circling, his tail wagging as he tried to figure out what had his daddy so excited. Mora didn’t even try to speak Rownt, going straight for English. “This is incredible. The Imshee are getting ready to dock and I’m…” Mora held out a hand to show the tremor. “How about you?”

Liam plastered on a smile. “Fairly excited with a side of apprehension.” 

“Oh, I’m with you there. My Grandmother has a primer of Imshee language, but apparently they trade in Rownt, something to do with the idea that Imshee believe that the more developed species should adapt. I’m surprised the Rownt don’t take that as an insult.” Mora shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and now the eldest Grandmother started to amble over. As far as Liam could tell, the older Grandmothers avoided moving around much, but this one did tend to chase Mora down on a regular basis.

“Rownt like insults,” Liam said.

“Even when they’re the target?”

Behind Liam, Ondry huffed. Liam ignored him and answered Mora. “If it’s a well-placed insult, they respect it. However, in this case, I suspect they would call the statement that Imshee are more developed a factual statement.”

“We would,” Ondry agreed as the Grandmother came up behind Mora. She rested her hand against his neck and her fingers traced small circles against his skin.

Mora looked from the Grandmother to Ondry. “How are you defining developed?”

For several seconds, neither answered, but then the Grandmother offered up the information. For the hundredth time, Liam wondered if all Grandmothers and tuk were more open with information since they were the ruling class and making the best choices required information or if these Rownt were more open because a spaceship had significantly less room for error or if the Rownt were simply trapped into giving away information because their paletias insisted on asking questions when silence would have been more appropriate.

The Grandmother said, “Their species has possessed space travel significantly longer. They control more planets and have significantly more industrial infrastructure. They have also damaged their planet and they seek unimportant profits, leaving them to need our technology for their most important tasks. I doubt the Imshee have a single spaceship that does not have at least one Rownt component in it.”

Mora whistled and a dozen pairs of Rownt eyes grew large with curiosity. “Whoa,” Mora said. “That’s shocking.”

“Why?” The Grandmother asked.

Liam explained when Mora hesitated. “He means that humans would feel uncomfortable relying so much on an ally. And if humans considered that ally less developed, they would be even less comfortable.”

“Rownt are not Anla,” the Grandmother said, and that was true enough that it didn’t need to be said, but she said it and used tones so neutral and devoid of any judgment that Liam suspected he was being judged anyway. Children were off-limits when it came to insulting them, and Liam was almost sure the Grandmother had just implied he and Mora were children. “The Imshee know they can trust our trades,” she added.

Mora had missed all of the subtext because he asked, “That’s pretty trusting. As a species, are they prone to believing others?”

The skin around her eyes was tight with amusement. “Quite the opposite.”

“But they trust the Rownt?”

“They trust the Rownt of the Calti,” she said. Another Grandmother called out for the Grandmothers to gather. “I apologize palteia of mine, but I must greet the Imshee.” She stroked his neck once more before leaning down to run her long fingers over Duke’s back. His tail wagged harder.

“They’re bringing a shuttle to the Calti and then we’re going across to talk to them,” Mora said once the Grandmother had left. “I wonder if the protocol governing the meeting place is formalized in writing or if the Rownt understand the logic behind it.”

Liam raised his eyebrows. That was definitely an insulting assumption. “I’m sure they do.”

“I don’t know. They seem unusual in their lack of interest in the causes behind certain things.”

Behind him, Ondry pressed closer as though subconsciously pulled toward this information. Unlike the Rownt on the Calti, he had only a limited understanding of the Imshee based on a few trades he made on-planet as a child. He needed something that would give him a trading edge, and Liam was determined to find it. “Such as?” Liam asked.

“Pronouns for one.” Mora leaned close and said in a shocked voice, “The Imshee have no singular personal pronouns.”

“At all?” Liam only knew two languages well—English and Rownt—with a weak background in Spanish and Anla, but he was fairly sure all of those languages accounted for linguistic plurality. Anla had a strong default toward plurals, so when discussing people, they almost always used plural forms. Rownt carried a weak default toward singular. However, all the languages Liam knew had an ability to express both singular and plural ideas in their pronouns. “Do they conjugate for number?”

“Weirdly, yes. But they start with a small group and go up from there. They have five personal pronouns, and the Rownt interpret all of them as ‘We’ or ‘Us.’ And the movement toward making nouns more concrete and expressing them in the plural is unbelievable.” Mora’s voice went up on the last word.

“I’m not following you.”

“Concretizing and pluralization in syntactic analyses,” Mora blurted out as if that made any sense.

“Please remember I was a language tech,” Liam said. When all else failed, he found reminding people that he hadn’t even finished his free secondary schooling much less any advanced training was usually enough to get them to explain in smaller words. “Command trained me to speak Rownt. Sort of. They didn’t do a good job with it, but that was their intent. They didn’t bother teaching me why certain grammar rules worked. And I definitely don’t know most of the terms in your last sentence—at least not in the context you used them.”

Mora blushed. “Sorry. Sometimes I get blinders on because your work is so brilliant that I have a hard time remembering that you don’t know all the underlying structure. Take a word like ‘content.’ If I’m talking about the content of a book, I’m more likely to call it the contents.”

“Because you can split the ideas up into different parts. You have more than one idea in a book,” Liam said, easily seeing where this was going. Sometimes Mora went too fast and assumed Liam had linguistic training Liam didn’t; however, other times he took too long to explain a simple idea.

“Exactly,” Mora blurted. “But content is abstract. It’s like water. I should be able to use it in a singular abstract form, but the second I turn that into a concrete plural, it reveals how humans see the spatial and temporal existence of information in a book.” Mora sounded excited by the explanation, but Liam wasn’t following. He also didn’t see how a discussion of abstract English nouns would help him trade with Imshee. Hell, he was starting to think that he understood Rownt so well because he’d stopped trying to understand the syntax and grammar and just started listening to the ideas. Ondry had given him that gift by listening to what Liam had to say, even when Liam couldn’t make his nouns match his verbs.

“Okay. And if Imshee don’t use singular personal pronouns or if they make abstract ideas more concrete, does that mean something?”

Mora shrugged. “I’m sure it does, but I don’t know what. And as far as I can tell, the Rownt haven’t invested much energy into figuring out why the Imshee language is so radically different than most Earth languages or Rownt or the three main Anla languages.”

“I’m not sure they care.” Liam waited for Ondry to add his thoughts, but he remained a silent shadow just over Liam’s shoulder.

“As frustrating as that is, you might be right. They figured out how the pronouns affected trade and set everything else aside as unimportant, especially since the Imshee insist on using the Rownt language for all trading.” 

Liam agreed with the Rownt lack of interest, but he decided to keep his negativity to himself. Mora was excited, more than he had been since joining the ship, and Liam wanted him to find something he could feel passionate about. If Imshee pronouns did it for him, good for him.

“It’s all so fascinating,” Mora said again. “I wonder how long until the Imshee shuttle docks.” Mora turned and headed toward the Grandmothers.

“Are Imshee pronouns that interesting?” Ondry asked softly.

“Not to me.” Liam shrugged. “How long will it take to dock?

“Until they dock,” Ondry said. 

Liam grabbed his nose with his thumb and forefinger—a gesture a human would dismiss as an itchy nose. However, pinching his nostrils together was the closest Liam could come to showing his aggravation through narrowing his nostrils. Ondry huffed at him. They all stood around for fifteen or twenty minutes before the eldest Grandmother headed for the exit without warning. Liam wished her knew how the Rownt decided who got to go and who stayed, but tuk and Grandmothers quickly sorted themselves, some following the eldest while others stayed behind. Liam followed as Ondry joined the back of the group.

Liam took several deep breaths as he tried to control his emotions. He wasn’t sure if the lure of a longer life or the fear of an insectoid species was freaking him out more, but when Ondry wrapped his tail around Liam’s thigh, Liam leaned into that comfort. Immediately, Ondry pulled him closer with a huge arm around Liam’s chest. They walked through a wide tunnel, and the lights began to dim as they moved closer to the other side. The air grew warmer and had a strange scent, like the desert after a storm.

A door at the far end opened, and the eldest Grandmother ducked to enter the new ship. Other Rownt followed, but only the oldest were too tall to walk easily through, so the door had to be at least ten or twelve feet tall. Liam was starting to wonder if humans were the miniature version of sentient life—the Chihuahua of the universe. 

When Liam and Ondry entered the Imshee ship, the lack of furnishings and eerie green lighting made Liam feel a little like he had entered a Halloween fun house, only this time the alien monsters were real. 

Liam took a deep breath and tried to keep his face impassive as the hatch to the Rownt ship slid closed and an interior door opened with a hiss, allowing more dry air to rush into the large, empty space. An Imshee trader stood behind it.

It was huge—even compared to the Rownt. It was the size of a small personal shuttle or one of those antique road vehicles that could carry eight to ten people. A shiver travelled up Liam’s spine, and Ondry draped an arm over Liam’s shoulders as the creature came into the room. Thank god there was only one of it.

It had two front legs that ended in hooked claws that the Imshee slid along the floor. The multiple segments were definitely insectoid, but the form looked spindly somehow, as if the thin legs didn’t match the square and solid body. It seemed to use its much larger back legs to push itself forward in short hops. Between those sliding front legs and the large pushing back ones were either four or six additional limbs attached to a hairy body. At least two arms clutched electronics.

When it stopped, it sat up, the huge back legs folded under as if the Imshee were squatting. “We are happy to see Our favorite trader again,” the Imshee said in perfectly accented Rownt, followed by a series of clicks. It emphasized the pronouns in a way that made Liam think of Mora’s earlier lecture. When Liam glanced over, Mora was plastered to the side of the eldest Grandmother. Liam couldn’t blame him considering they were up front, just feet from the Imshee.

One of the Imshee’s middle legs kept waving, but five additional ones stilled. Now that the Imshee had slowed its arms, the lack of a head was even more disturbing than the patches of long hair that made the Imshee look as though it was suffering mange. The hair seemed to have a greenish tinge, but that might have been the lighting.

On the bare spots, the Imshee skin was a dull black with white mottling down the arms. And where Liam expected breastbones, it had a series of enormous eyes that looked like shattered glass, white with deep red veins traveling through them. Liam couldn’t tell where the voice came from, but the center of the Imshee’s back had a long ridge with a series of what looked like flaps. It was as if a crab, a spider, and a dying dog had an unfortunate threesome.

The Grandmother bowed deeply. “I would wish the Imshees of this ship prosperous trades, but I hope to leave the Imshees of this ship with no fuel to break out of orbit.”

“Rownt are too young as a species to win more in trade than the dust from Our Their filters.” The doubling of the pronoun must have caught Mora’s attention because he stood a little straighter

The Grandmother whistled. “If we lack age and experience, perhaps we should trade our excess hand computers with the Imshees of another ship.”

“If Our favorite traders have excess, perhaps They are desperate to find Them a buyer.” The multiple pronouns sounded awkward, but the Imshee knew the true language of the Rownt—insults. Either their culture also appreciated a good insult or they were indulging Rownt sensibilities.

The Grandmother darkened in pleasure. “Rownt build large ships. We have the storage space to carry such pieces for a century.”

The Imshee tapped one of his hooked front feet against the floor in a quick staccato. “There are no profits in carrying goods.”

The Grandmother’s face tightened. “Then the life forms in front of me admit the Rownt shall profit off the Imshee of this ship.”

The Imshee’s center flaps all undulated, and a sighing trill escaped as the Imshee rattled both front hooks against the floor. “Our favorite trader will not speak of profit when We take all the advantage to Us and Us. Come. Speak of this unfamiliar species Our favorite trader brings to the Imshees of this ship.” The Imshee turned its huge body so the long line along the spine pointed toward Mora. The Grandmother moved amazingly fast, putting her own body between the Imshee and him.

“Discussion is acceptable. Touch is not,” the Grandmother said with a less-than-polite hiss. Liam hadn’t seen the Imshee move toward Mora, but if it had, Liam was giving Mora credit for not running and screaming in terror. The man had balls.

The room was silent for long minutes, and then the Imshee made another rattling noise before saying, “Either this one is a child or Our favorite traders have found new beliefs since last We met Our favorite trader.”

“He is no child, but Rownt do not share the color of our pillows with those we would not have in our nest.”

“And Rownts’ nests are not large enough for Imshees.” He added another series of clicks. “Come. Let Us and Us discuss.” The Imshee turned and headed back through the door he’d come out of.

When Liam had been studying languages for the first time, he had given up studying Anla because the species was just too weird. Liam had just discovered that the Anla were definitely not the strangest species in the universe.

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13