Silent Dances (21 page)

purr
.
She t
ri
ed it once
,
timidly
,
then stronger. "Good
,"
Taller signed
,
encouragingly
. "
T
ry
again." They did it together
,
while Tesa watched
their patterns become more and more alike.
So speech therapy was good

for something
after all,
she thought with w
ry
amusement.
"
That
'
s fine
,"

Taller told her.

Weaver man
ipulated the cloak with her bill. There in the center lay the

uncovered egg. Tesa could have held it easily in two hands
.
It was

oblong
,
its base color a soft grayish green, speckled in brown and red

splotches
-
perfect camouflage against a bare nest
.
It almost seemed a
rt
ificial.

Tesa glanced at her voder.
Weaver was pur
ri
ng at the egg, and it rocked

in answer to her voice
. There
really
w
as
something alive in there
.
The
Indi
an
wom
an
felt a flush of excitement.

"Touch the egg," Weaver signed to her. "Speak to him."

104

Touch it?
Tesa thought ne
rv
ously
.
Gently she cradled the egg, feeling
its living warmth, the porcelainlike texture of its shell. An irregular

tapping tickled her palms.
We're family,
now,
hoksila,
little boy
,
Tesa
thought to the egg
.
We're blood, you and I
...
She became aware of a
thin, faint thudding that was the chick
'
s heart
be
at
.
The heartbeat
of the
World.
It was a drumbe
at that her body wanted to tu
rn
into a flash of
dancing.
...
This child
'...
is not just any child ...

Tesa felt she was the center of a
hunka lowanpi-a
makingofrelatives

ceremony.
B
ri
nging her face near the egg, she purred
.
The vibrations
against her hand grew stronger
.
The egg rocked
.
He was answe
ri
ng
her! She prayed
,
ending it with the traditional phrase
,
mitakuye oyasin

-
all
my relatives--the phrase that tied her people to their world and all beings in it.

Then the egg rocked hard against her hands and suddenly cracked!
Tesa

pulled her hands away as though she'd
be
en bu
rn
ed
.
Oh, God,
did I
do that?

Taller and Weaver hovered over the egg. Near its large end was a tiny

spiderweb crack,
shaped like a star
.
The two avians leaped up
,
threw
back their heads
,
and called loud and long.

Taller
'
s golden eyes were round in delight as he finished his call. "He
'

s pipped
!"
he signed to the human. "What a wonderful sign for our new
kind of family."

Weaver moved to cover the egg with her body, but Taller blocked her.

Carefully, the avian leader eased himself onto the egg, chest first
,

adjusting his breast feathers until the egg was warmed by his body.

Weaver hovered anxiously over him. This close to the hatching
,
she

would only stop incubating when he insisted
.
Convincing her to eat

was another matter.

"Did you know the chick would pip tonight?"
Good Eyes asked
.
Her sta
rt
ling eyes were as wide as Taller had ever seen them.

"I thought,
perhaps--but he's early
.
Early chicks are strong--eager to see
the World
,
impatient to get on with life." He said that for Weaver's

benefit
.
She needed this chick to recover from Water Dancer
'
s death
and the desecration of his body
.
Though really
,
she had handled that
be
tt
er than he had.

"The suns have their reasons," she'
d said when he'd brought her the

skin
. "
Perhaps Dancer is still needed
,
and through his skin
,
he still
lives."

Her signs had comfort
ed him in a way he'd not thought

105

SILENT DANCES 105 possible when first he'd touched his son
'
s

remains.

"The chick
will rest now
," Weaver told Good Eyes. "It
may be an entire
day before
he begins cutting
his way out."

"
Retu
rn
to
your
own shelter
," Taller
signed. "Sleep there.

Come back
in the mo
rn
ing and be
part of
our family."

"
How early
should I come
?" Good Eyes asked. "
Before the Father
Sun
," Taller
signed.

"I'll be here." She turned to leave, her eyes
moving about the shelter
.

Perhaps
the hum
an
s weren
'
t as nearsighted as he'd thought
. Good Eyes
peered again at the
story of the
Beautiful
But Deadly Fish.
I gave
her
a true name,
Taller realized.

Once outside the shelter
,
Tesa exhaled in a rush
,
her legs buckled
,
and she sat down in a heap
.
She'd move into the shelter tomorrow, a

week ahead of time! She threw up her arms and slid down the slick emb

an
kment on her butt
,
jogged through water toward Meg
an
d Thorn

until she remembered her stilts. She waded back
,
strapped them on,

then plowed out to her waiting mentors.

Exuberantly,
she grabbed Meg's shoulders but the water was too deep

and they started to fall. Meg latched onto Thorn who floundered wildly t

ry
ing to steady them
.
They managed to regain their equilib
ri
um

without a dunking.

"
The chick
'
s pipped
!"
Tesa signed as soon as she could. "You nearly
knocked us in the d
ri
nk
,
Good Eyes!" Thorn
an
swered
.
He was
tense, edgy.

"
The chick's early
?"
Meg signed
,
unsmiling.

Tesa sobered instan
tly
. "
Taller said that me
an
t the chick was strong
.

Was he just saying that?"

Meg shrugged.

"As if we didn'
t have enough to wor
ry
about," Thorn signed.

"We thought we'd have more time to teach you Grus ways ..." Meg

explained. "You've only been here
a day."

"
No sense belabo
ri
ng it, Meg," Thorn signed.

Tesa felt deflated,
their conce
rn
s sweeping away her enthusiasm
.
She
shivered
.
Her feelings were wrong
,
backward. "The first few weeks you
can use your voder to study our
files," Meg signed,
with a tight smile
.

"The chick
will still be sleeping a lot
then.
" She looked at Thorn as
though t
ry
ing to make him feel better
. "
It's the best we can do."

A jagged fork of lightning ri
pped across the late
-
afte
rn
oon

106

sky, high in the atmosphere, its bright flash obscuring, for the briefest

second, the light of the setting suns.

"Oh, no, don't tell me we're going to have a storm on top of everything else,"

Meg complained.

"Doubt it," Thorn assured her, "it's too high up." Another bolt seared the heavens as Meg and Thorn began wading back to the camp.

Tesa waited for more lightning but none came.
They can't hear the thunder,

either,
she thought fearfully.

107

Tesa knelt on the narrow bed, staring at the star-studded night sky. She was

wearing her favorite sleep shirt with its faded StarBridge logo. Feeling

chil ed, she pul ed her old quilt up around her.

Trinity's three moons were creeping over the horizon, two full, one the

thinnest
crescent. Father Moon, Mother Moon, New Hatchling Moon. A

good
sign
, according to the Grus--the Moons of the New Hatchling ...

unless
Taller's chick was their gift.

Meg and Thorn had regained their optimism during the walk back. Thorn had

made an elaborate dinner, topping it off with a heart-berry pie. During the

meal, Tesa had been able to shake, for a while, the worry she'd felt after

leaving the nest shelter.

Tesa told the biologists some of the things she and Taller had discussed, but

hesitated telling them about the story-walls. She wanted to see them better

herself first.

Now dinner was only a satisfied memory and the long night lay ahead. Her

eyes strayed to her jacket, hung on a convenient chair, hiding her feathers.

She thought of the Aquila feather, how it had glittered in

108

the twilight like metal, its quill rigid, strong, a puff of soft down' floating at the

base, alive, quivering with power. Tesa rubbed her forehead, trying to erase

the chaotic fragments of dreams that kept drifting across her mind.

That lightning this afternoon had been heat lightning--nothing more, she told

herself, firmly. She refused to see it as a sign meant for her, a sign to make

her wonder whether she'd chosen the right path. If she started believing
that,

she'd then have to wonder exactly what her dreams were telling her to do.

Rob Gable, she knew, had had no idea of the level of responsibility the Grus

would expect of her. He'd seen this assignment
as an unusual
pair project,

no doubt-one that would be completed in about a year. But now, Tesa

realized, there was more than that involved. And she couldn't help

wondering whether she was doing the right thing in parenting this chick.

Already, human contact had changed the avians in subtle ways. Humans

had renamed their planet, renamed the Grus themselves.
Why do we keep

cal ing them some old Latin word?
Tesa wondered.
Even I do it, and I
know
how it feels to be renamed as though you didn't exist before you were

discovered!

This child Tesa would soon be helping to raise--what would be normal for

him? What effect might she have on the avians' culture? Were the privateers

really the greatest danger the Grus faced, or could it be that twenty years

from now cultural anthropologists would look back and chronicle a

sociological disaster aided by a naive woman who had ignored her dreams

and the bitter lessons of her heritage? She remembered Sacajawea.

Tesa pulled the quilt tighter, trying to shake off her fears. Some people had

space travel and some people didn't; that was an inescapable reality. If the

humans couldn't prove the avians' intelligence, Trinity would be thrown open

for colonization, and then the Grus would undoubtedly suffer the same grim

fate other primal peoples had.

But one thing had changed since the days of Columbus and the

Conquistadores. She'd been sent to be the interrelator--to understand
them,

become one of
them,
prove their intelligence. Then, if there were a thousand

humans here-and in ten years there might be twice that-it wouldn't matter if

none
of them believed the Grus were people, because the interrelator would.

109

And
nothing
happened without her say-so. That was her job, to speak for the people,
to keep their world
theirs.

So, Tesa scolded herself,
as she headed for the desk terminal,
stop

fretting
and get to
work.
As she skimmed through Scott's b
ri
ef notes on
chick
-
rearing
,
she was brought up sho
rt
by the mention of Aquila
.

Leaning closer, she read the decision Sco
tt
had made two years

before.

"I've given up discussing the Aquila with Dancer,"
Scott wrote
. "
He insists
the Aquila are ùncivilized,' that they'rèmindless killers.' His proof is

that the Aquila nest without shelters, that they have no sign language,

and that they are p
re
dators that eat the Grus--a potent argument, that

last one. However
,
the Grus a
re
p
re
dators themselves
,
p
re
ferring
live food to any other
.
The difference in housing could be cultural. As

for language
,
many Grus find us ùncivilized
'
since our language is

spoken. To them
,
vocalizing is p
ri
mitive
,
used only for declaring
territo
ry,
or love
,
or wa
rn
ing off enemies. To them
,
only signing is
language
,
with its poet
ry
of movement and its
ri
ch literature of sign
combinations
.
Opera would have no meaning here
--
Moza
rt
would be
only cacophony."