7. Underground Understandings
Neither Jodi nor I really know precisely what we did in that moment. That clearly spoken English sentence stunned me so much that all I know for certain is that we stood there for a while, staring at him with our mouths literally hanging open. Just as we started to recover, the King suddenly began to emit a series of whooping noises which, after a moment, we realized must be laughter.
"Hooo Hooo Hooo Hooo! OOOoohoohooohoo! You really do appear that way! Pardon, I mean, look like that-when surprised."
"You speak English?!" I finally got out, rattled enough to slide into dialect. "What th" h.e.l.l"s goin" on here? Weren"t four hours ago I first heard a word of your language, an" from their reactions I"d thought was the first time y"all had heard ours!"
That sent him into another fit of laughter. Jodi and I exchanged glances. This wasn"t even vaguely what we"d expected. It didn"t help that I actually recognized the voice. Well, not really recognized it, exactly, but I knew I"d heard that voice before many times.
Finally he settled down. "In a way, you are quite right. And in another way, no, I do not speak your language. That"-he gestured to the twisted structure behind him-"speaks your language, through me."
That brought all sorts of icky possibilities to mind, just looking at the thing.
"Are you the ruler here, or is it?"
The shrieking snort seemed equal parts amus.e.m.e.nt and annoyance. "I am the High Spirit here. That is a . . ." He seemed at a loss, finally saying, "makatdireskovi. There are several words in your language which seem to partly apply, none of them actually meaning what I am trying to say."
"So what do you mean by saying you hadn"t heard our language before?" Jodi asked.
"Never before have we heard your voices speaking in our manner," the Nome King-well, High Spirit-said. "But there were those of us who ventured into Tennatu-the Land of Fast Changes-who, in past cycles, began to turan certain signals which we realized were not natural. We made this makatdireskovi to help us understand what we sensed, and eventually did. But we never realized it was your people who were doing the speaking."
It took some considerable back-and-forth exchanges before we finally realized that they"d managed, over a period of many years, to derive our language from television broadcasts. That explained the voice-it was a combination of several TV anchormen, most notably Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, with a hint of Walter Cronkite. They had realized that part of the transmissions could represent a depiction of objects in some way. But because they didn"t see at all the way we did, and within their own "sight" spectrum had a different arrangement of seeing intensities and "colors," they could translate the signal but the "image" they got did not resemble the "image" their regular senses got of us at all. So they had no idea that the babbling in the air came from the same people that sometimes raided their caverns. That was also why it had taken the King several moments to verify that we really did look "surprised" in the same way as the images they had previously extracted from the signals. The makatdireskovi and he had needed to find the translation between the signal-images and what he was seeing.
"Okay," I said finally, realizing how much time had pa.s.sed, "I think we need to at least cover a little business before we go back to this discussion, sir. We came down here to see if we could try to fix up the bad blood that"s been built up between us over the years."
He sat still for a moment, head tilting in that birdlike fashion again, and then gave a nod. The gesture was clearly deliberate, something he must have learned from the transmissions they monitored. "I had hoped this was true. You do not seem to be suicidal or hostile, despite the formidable reputation you have among my people. What do you propose?"
"Well, first off, you"ve got us in your power, so if you"d be so kind as to pull your people back off our land topside, and then I can tell my folks to relax-that we"re talkin"?"
He considered that for a moment, then raised his staff and barked out several commands in their own language. "It is done. Tell your people that mine shall bother them no more, at least so long as we remain in council."
I keyed up the mike. "Father?"
He responded instantly, even though it must"ve been a good hour and a half, maybe two hours of nothing but waiting before he heard anything. "Yes, Clint?"
"We"re having a good conversation here and might be here a long time. But we"re able to talk together-don"t ask me to explain the ins-and-outs right now-and the King has agreed to pull back his people. Can you check that for me?"
"Hold on, son." A few minutes pa.s.sed, then: "Clint, all disappeared a short time back. Looks like everyone"s playing on the level."
I relaxed. The situation could still get bad, but it looked like we were past the worst. "Good, Father. You guys pull back too, then. Me and Jodi can find our way back if we have to, and I don"t think we"re in any danger here."
"Will do. Be back every few hours to check on you, though."
"Okay, Father. Take care."
"You take care of that girl, hear me?"
"Yes, Father."
"Good luck."
I put the transmitter away. "You know, I think we"ve forgotten all our manners. I"m Clinton Slade. This is my fiancee, Jodi Goldman."
The Nome King had apparently seen plenty of introduction scenes. He rose up on his slender pipestem legs and gave a low bow. "A pleasure, Mr. Clinton Slade, Miss Jodi Goldman. I am Rokhasetanamaethetal, the High Spirit of the Nowethada."
We returned his bow. "Rokasta . . . ?"
"Rokhasetanamaethetal," he repeated. Jodi frowned, and I caught the impression of sounds involved in that name that I couldn"t even describe.
"I"m not sure I can even say that properly, sir," Jodi said.
"Ah, yes. I recall that the vibrations that formed your language did seem to have, relatively speaking, great simplicity. We can reproduce any such vibration very easily, but you seem to be more limited. Choose another name for me, if you wish. I will see if it suits me."
I was strongly tempted to call him Ruggedo and see if he"d take it, but it was time to drop that line of thinking. "Let"s just shorten it a bit, sir. How about Rokhaset?" The name sounded vaguely Egyptian, said that way, and the tube-beard did kinda look like the tight little beards you saw on the Egyptian statues.
"That will do well enough. Come then. You have stood long before my throne, and in the images your people send through the air the makatdireskovi has noted that you prefer to sit, as do we if the time is overly long."
He gestured with his great scepter, and the other Nomes parted along the line of the gesture. It was a smooth and well-practiced movement that simultaneously gave me great respect for their attentiveness and reaction time, and a bit of wariness about our so-far genial host. That kind of coordinated, instant obedience I"d only seen in humans when the boss was a pretty hard-a.s.sed tyrant . . . or in a very heavily drilled military establishment.
At the far end of this pathway, a pa.s.sage was visible in the light of our lantern. Noticing the beam again for the first time in a while brought something urgently to mind. "High Spirit, sir?"
"Just call me Rokhaset, as you have named me. Might I call you Clinton Slade and your friend Jodi Goldman, instead of by formal terms? Yes? Very well, then. What is it?" The High Spirit led us down this new course.
"Your people see using senses we don"t-I guess the word you"re using for it is "turan"-and we see using ones you don"t. The problem is that our light"s going to go out in not too many hours, and we"ll really be pretty helpless without it." This was something of an exaggeration, as we had several light sources on us which would enable us to manage some kind of illumination for quite a while, but I wanted to see what his reaction was.
He tilted his head. "Rather as I am matturan near you and your iron and steel, eh? Give me this lantern of yours for a moment."
"Be careful with it," Jodi admonished him.
"As though it were a child, I a.s.sure you."
Reluctantly she handed him the lantern. He took the hard-plastic-cased giant flashlight and examined it carefully, running his fingers across it. "How do you activate it?"
Jodi indicated the on/off switch, then had to physically place his fingers on it, as he couldn"t actually see the gesture. While his people often gave the impression of sight like our own, things like this constantly reminded us that what we were seeing wasn"t what they saw.
Rokhaset moved forward. As we went to follow, he stopped and held out a hand. "Wait a moment, please. I wish to be able to examine this clearly, and your presence with all of your iron makes that impossible."
We waited as he moved about thirty yards on, then stopped and examined the light again. There was a click and we were in darkness. "Hey!" I said.
"Just testing. So it is now no longer giving you illumination?"
"It"s off."
He verified this by switching it on and off several times, then brought it back to us. "I believe I can arrange something, if I understand the operation correctly." Rokhaset screeched some orders to his people, and then gestured for us to follow. "There are many things for us to discuss, I believe, but first it is time for us to speak together as friends. It has been a very, very long time indeed since my people and yours spoke as one people."
"I wondered about that. There are legends among our people about spirits who live in the earth and who fear the sunlight or who are vulnerable to iron."
"The "sunlight," as you call it, merely confuses some of us, and can damage our eyes over time by causing them to fog. There are some beings that avoid your sunlight for more pressing reasons." Rokhaset spoke those words as we pa.s.sed along a polished-looking corridor. "But I am surprised by your people even having legends, for the time when the Nowethada and the Tennathada walked and spoke together is many generations past even for my people. Indeed, it was thought to be no more than legend by many of the Nowethada, as none of them could even tell whether your people spoke at all."