Damocles (24 page)

“This Meg hears? This Loul Meg hears?”

“Yes. Loul is okay.” She hummed low and even. “Loul is not okay.” She raised the pitch, letting her throat choke the sounds to a stutter.

Loul’s mouth hung slightly open, his thrum soft and even. He brought his hands up between them. “Meg…is okay…Loul…” His hands hung in the air like he’d forgotten how to use them. He shifted, rocking on his thick legs until he leaned toward the table, still facing her.

“Loul? Yes?”

His right hand reached out slowly toward her face and his teeth ground together. “Is okay…Loul…here?” His hand came close to her jaw.

Meg smiled, tilting her head to the side, exposing the soft skin beneath her ear to him. She turned a bit, showing the pale expanse of her neck. “Touch?” She drew his hand and put it to her own pulse point, wondering if he could feel the faint movement there. She felt the tender pads of his fingers open against her skin, could feel the warmth where the rougher skin parted. A small part of her worried they were crossing some line of propriety, but as always she went with her gut, not her rule book.

“Yes? Talk this.” She put her hand over his on her throat. ProLingLang captured his word for the pulse point, which she labeled the thrum spot since the Dideto had other pulse points that didn’t make any noise and weren’t darker in tone. Cho had declared the spot sexual in nature, an erogenous zone, but sitting here with Loul, his tender fingertips on her throat, having been forgiven for lying and scaring him near to death, she thought maybe there was more to it.

Under the sensitive skin of his finger pads, Loul could feel the blood rushing beneath Meg’s skin. He could feel how soft the tissue was there, and he thought her slender neck might be even
more fragile than it looked. But she didn’t flinch or tense as his thick fingers rested against the warm skin. He felt the muscles flex as she breathed and swallowed, her eyes closing slightly at his touch. The Effans had discussed the absence of the rose spot, speculating that perhaps it was simply a pigmentation issue. The range of colors of the Urfers varied so much, from the very pale Prader to the very dark Agnar. Cho’s midtone skin bore darker-than-black symbols; Meg and Cheffson both had spots of color sprinkled across their skin, although none of the colored patches were large enough or showed any sensitivity to serve as a rose spot.

Meg relaxed into his touch but somehow it felt different from the Dideto way. Maybe she didn’t know enough to really relax into the touch. And maybe Urfers only really responded when they were in their stasis mode. The Effans had let Loul watch Meg and Cho when they were in stasis, their bodies alternating between limp and active, responding to stimuli the scientists couldn’t explain. Maybe their rose spot rested somewhere else on their bodies. Maybe they didn’t have one at all.

Grandma Bo used to tell him stories about the old sea gods who didn’t have rose spots. She would gather all the kids around the shucking pit, keeping them captivated with her stories so they would keep shucking the
mogi
and
ketso
and stay out of their parents’ hair. In her stories, the sea gods rose out of the water and left enormous footprints all across Didet, needing to keep their feet from getting muddy. She said the sea gods had come from the center of the planet, and because they could breathe underwater, where sound travels faster than on land, they could speak in the slightest whispers. According to Grandma Bo, the people on the land couldn’t hear them when they spoke, so the sea gods put magical shells just below the peoples’ ears. The shells dissolved, leaving the rose spot. And after the sea gods went back
to the center of the planet, the people forgot how to hear with the rose spot but they never forgot what it felt like to hear the gods.

“That’s why only the most important people, only the people you truly love,” she would say, brushing her fingers across each of their young necks, “can make your rose spot blush.”

Loul pulled his finger away from Meg’s neck, smiling when he saw the flush of color where his fingertips had been.

Meg and Loul were still smiling at each other when Wagner started to shout. He and Olum, the leader of the Dideto work team, both fell back from their table where wires and screens and plugs and clamps teetered in a mess nobody dared approach. Olum and his crew shimmied and jumped, bumping into each other as Wagner held his hands high in the air, bellowing a wordless cry. Everyone spun toward the scene, not knowing if the news was good or bad. Jefferson swore, then Cho, and when Meg looked down she saw her light screen had gone black, her wristband flashing in warning.

“Hey!” she shouted at Wagner, who ignored her. “What did you do?”

Loul rose from the booth, trying to see what the ruckus was over the heaps of equipment. On the far side of the site, Prader threw down a wrench, nearly taking Kik out at the knee, and she stalked toward the captain. Before anyone could reach them, Wagner, Olum, and two others in the crew body slammed into each other, chests first. Unfortunately for Wagner, his chest was a great deal higher than the crew’s and he took the brunt of the thrust in the gut. They also outweighed him and in seconds the
captain disappeared under a huddle of muscular, grunting bodies. Jefferson and Prader were first to reach the pile, stopping just sort of throwing fists when they heard Wagner laughing.

“We did it!” His breath caught as another shoulder hit his gut, but he wheezed out another laugh. “We did it!” Olum and crew pounded the ground around them, rolling off of the captain when they realized the damage they were doing. Olum’s second, a gray-haired woman with faded black bands across her fingers, started a two-two-one beat on the ground that the rest of the team quickly picked up. Wagner laughed, catching his breath, and then joined them in hammering his fists against the ground.

Cho, with the Effans in tow, sidled up to the edge of Meg’s booth. “He crashed our computer system? Yippee. Maybe Prader can blow a hole in the fuel cell and we can make a party out of it.”

Meg laughed, craning her neck to watch the captain and Olum pounding the ground, grinning at each other. When the captain threw back his head and let out another one of his unmistakable bellowing laughs, Olum reached forward and cupped his hand around the captain’s neck, just under his ear. The captain responded in kind, bringing his hand up and clutching the man at the neck, his long dark fingers covering Olum’s flushed thrumming spot. She heard Cho make a little sound of warning but put her hand out to stop him.

“I don’t think it means what you think it means. I think there’s more to it.”

Unless Olum and Wagner had secretly become lovers at some point, Meg seemed to be right. The two men grinned at each other, pulling each other in until their foreheads bumped. Around them the work crew continued their rhythmic pounding of the ground, crouching and rocking. It might have gone on for hours if an empty cable wheel hadn’t sailed through the air and hit Wagner on the back.

Prader saw her missile hit home. “You two want to take your make-out session somewhere else? I just lost my propulsion diagnostic!”

Meg heard Cho mutter something about a psychopath as Wagner and Olum rose to their feet, their grins not diminished a whit. “For your information, Officer Prader, you have lost exactly shit. Not only have you not lost your precious propulsion diagnostic, you have now gained the ability to run your data in two languages.”

“I can already run it in Mandarin,” Prader said.

Wagner looked heavenward, shaking his head. “Reboot your screens. All of you.”

Meg reset her wristband, and when the light flashed, she pulled the light screen across the table. It flickered, taking longer than usual to reset, but when it did, she heard Loul’s thrum rise. The text boxes came to life across the screen, the words and questions and syntax grouping where she had left them. Only now, beneath each text box, another blue box appeared with groupings of dots and lines she couldn’t decipher. She couldn’t decipher them but Loul could. He leaned over the table, pushing back into the booth to sit beside her, his hands hovering over the screen as he hummed to himself.

“Loul talk to Meg.”

It took her a second to realize that he hadn’t spoken. Instead he had pressed the correct buttons on the light screen to activate the recorded audio.

“Loul has words for Meg. Loul has words…here.”

He grinned at her.

“Here.” His finger jabbed the word button for
here
as he laughed.

“You can read this?” Meg asked, knowing they didn’t have the word for
read
yet but Loul knew what she was saying. Wagner
and Olum had found a way to interface the two disparate computer systems. Loul and the rest of the work crews would be able to read the data the Earthers worked with. They would be able to share the information both sides so desperately wanted to share. This changed everything.

It didn’t change everything perfectly. Glitches and miscommunications still riddled the interface. Dideto expression of chemical compounds differed significantly from Earther science, and Cho and Jefferson teamed up to work with their respective teams. Whether a biologist or a geologist, chemicals were chemicals, and together the teams made more headway than alone. The breakthrough in the sharing of navigational charts caused what could only be called a ruckus among Wagner’s team, dozens of officials being called in to handle the flood of data the Space Administration officials had never dreamed of seeing in their lifetimes. Prader and Kik and company didn’t see too much of a difference, Prader concentrating more on teaching Kik to weld the polymer compound around the thrusters than teaching him the physics of propulsion.

It was Meg and Loul who hit the biggest stumbling blocks. The Dideto database contained a large number of words that the Earther computer stalled on, churned over, and inexplicably translated consistently as
turkey
. Meg suspected this was a deeply hidden joke put in place by the original programmers back when the idea of an interface this unusual was inconceivable. Like most of the technology, the language, and the sense of time, the computer programming used throughout the terraforming ring and in deep space had all originated from Earth. It had all been designed to interface relatively easily with other systems. Like language itself, it all hailed from the same sensibility. Apparently Dideto data storage didn’t fall along those same lines, and more than once Meg had snorted at the computer’s bizarre translation.

“Government based upon equal distribution of life resources, population safety, and social turkey,” Meg read, laughing. Loul didn’t know why this important line from the Cartar Charter made her laugh until she explained the snafu. She brought up a picture of a turkey, one of the old huge-breasted white tom turkeys that had gone extinct in the late twenty-second century, because the absurdity of the bird perfectly captured the essence of the translation. Loul laughed too and they kept the bird in the center of the light screen. Every time it came up, Meg tapped it, activating the audio command so the “gobble gobble gobble” sound did the talking for her.

The interface changed everything. When Loul saw the script filling in the boxes beneath the Urfer symbols, he almost flipped the table in his joy. He drummed his hands, watching as words populated the screen, filling in the audio prompts Meg and the Urfers had recorded. Olum kept shouting something about a sound mirror, and Loul could only assume that he and Agnar had found a way to let the computers listen to each other. It was all beyond him. He’d never been much of a computer guy even though he spent the majority of his workday tethered to one. At least, he used to.

With the screen labeled in Cartar, Loul was able to phrase questions differently and flesh out the broken phrases he and Meg had been using. Vocabulary lists tripled and then tripled again and again as images met their equivalents in the communicating databases. Loul had no idea what that fat, white monstrosity was in the center of the screen—some sort of comic book animal?—but for some reason it kept popping up, making Meg laugh.

They had been way off in some of the assumptions. Those strings the Urfers sometimes ran through their mouths weren’t any type of feeding or relaxation method. It seemed the
tut
sometimes left fragments of fiber between their glassy teeth and those teeth were sensitive enough that the sensation drove the Urfers to distraction. And the small packets of gel they rubbed on their skin weren’t to protect against the sun or wind, as the Effans first suspected, but to heal the small breaks in their skin where even small rocks thrown by the wind would cut them. It seemed the skin all over their bodies was as sensitive as the tenderest skin in Loul’s finger pads.

They also had a complicated sense of humor, the tempo of which changed depending on who was teasing whom. As the vocabulary screen filled itself in with Loul’s language, he started making sense of the low phrases Cho often muttered to himself or to Meg, usually when the smallest Urfer, Prader, was making one of her large gestures. The computer didn’t translate all the words, but Loul began to get a sense that the further from the truth Cho spoke and the flatter he kept his tone, the more Meg laughed. In a way, Cho’s soft-spoken commentary reminded Loul of Hark and his knifelike friendly teasing.