Rot Akukkakk. She recalled the flat black eyes, red-rimmed, the long gray face, the voice very different from the whining tone of lesser kif. A bitter taste came into her mouth.

How many of them? she wondered, and pulled the scattered charts toward her on the desk and again thought like a kif, wondering just where he might station his ships remaining at Urtur, having figured now, as he must have figured, what they were up to.

That inward flight which was making the station safer — was also giving this Akukkakk a free field in which to operate. There were a finite number of opacities in the quadrant where the sweep of debris might be concealing The Pride. A diminishing number of other fugitives to confuse him… just them and him, finally, along with whatever other kif ships he had called in.

Four kif ships had been at Meetpoint. Some or all might have come with him. There might have been as many more at Urtur when Hinukku came in. Eight ships, say. Not beyond possibility.

She made her calculations again, flexed an ache from her shoulders, and pushed back from the desk, combed her beard with her fingers and flicked her ears for the soothing sound of the rings.

Huh. So. She at least knew their options — or the lack of them. It was a thoroughly bad game to have gotten into. She levered her aching body out of the chair it had occupied too many hours, stretched again, calculating that they must be about due for Chur and Geran to come on again. And Hilfy: there had not been a word out of her. Possibly the imp had been late getting to sleep after the news which had broken in on her rest. If she had been sleeping, so much the better.

Pyanfar walked out into the corridor and down it, into the dim zone of the bridge, beyond the archway, where most of the lights were out and the dead screens made areas dark which should have been busy with lights. There was one unexpected bright spot, a counter alight in that ell nook of the bridge around the main comp bank. Someone had come back and left it on, she thought, walking up on it to turn it out; and came on Hilfy there, seated with her attention fixed on the translator, left hand propping her forehead and her right hand poised over the translator keyboard. The screen in front of her was alive with mahendo’sat symbols. Audio brought in a pathetic Outsider-voiced attempt at speech. Pyanfar frowned, walked closer, and Hilfy saw the movement and half turned, turned back in haste to close off the audio from the bridge. Pyanfar leaned on the back of her chair to observe the strings of symbols on the screen, and Hilfy got up in haste.

Go, the Outsider was trying to say. That was the symbol on the screen at the moment. / go.

“I thought you were supposed to be resting,” Pyanfar said.

“I got tired of resting.”

Pyanfar nodded toward the screen, where the Figure Walking was displayed. “How’s it doing?”

“He.”

“It, he, how’s it doing?”

“Not so good on pronunciation.”

“You’ve been cutting in on his lessons? Talking to him?”

“He doesn’t know me from the machine.” Hilfy had her hands locked behind her, ears flat, wary of reprimands. “You can’t work the second manual without help: it’s sentences. He has to have prompts. I’ve got more vocabulary filled in with him. We’re well into abstracts and I’ve been able to figure something about the way his own sentences are built from what he keeps doing wrong with ours.”

“Huh. And have you perchance gotten a name out of him amid these mistakes? His species? An indication what he comes from? A location?”

“No.”

“Well. I didn’t expect. But well done, all the same. I’ll check it out.”

“Seven hundred fifty-three words. He ran the whole first manual. Chur demonstrated changing the keyboard and the cassette and he ran it all, just like that; and got into the second book, trying to do sentences. But he can’t pronounce, aunt; it just comes out like that.”

“Mouth shape is different. Can’t say we can ever do much with his language either; like trying to talk to the tc’a or the knnn… maybe even a different hearing range, certainly not the same equipment to speak with — gods, no guaranteeing the same logic, but the latter I think we may have. Some things he does make half sense.” She lowered herself into the vacated chair, reached and livened a second screen. “Go talk Tirun out of her work down in op, imp; she’s been on duty and she shouldn’t be. I’m going to try to run a translator tape on your seven hundred fifty-three words.”

“I did that.”

“Oh, did you?”

“While I was sitting here.” Hilfy untucked her hands from behind her and hastily reached for the counter, indicated the cassette in the slot of the translator input. “I pulled the basic pattern and sorted the words in. Sentence logic too. It’s finished.”

“Does it work?”

“I don’t know, aunt. He hasn’t given me a sentence in his own language. Just words. There’s no one for him to talk his own to.”

“Ah, well, so.” Pyanfar was impressed. She ran some of the audio of the tape past, cut it, looked up at Hilfy, who looked uncommonly proud of herself. “You’re sure of the tape.”

“The master program seemed clear. I — learned the translator principles pretty thoroughly; father didn’t connect that so much with spacing. I got to start that study from the first; but / knew what I wanted it for. Like comp. I’m good at that.”

“Huh. — Why don’t we try it, then?”

Hilfy nodded, more and more self-pleased. Pyanfar rose and searched through the com board cabinets, pulled out the box of sanitary wrapped audio plugs and dropped a handful of those into Hilfy’s palm, then located a spare pager from the same source. She sat down at main com and ran the double channels of the translator through bands two and three of the pagers. She took her own plug and inserted it in her ear, tested it out linked to the Outsider’s room com for a moment, and got nothing back but bursts of white sound, which were mangled hani words that part of the schizoid translator mind refused to recognize as words. “We’re two, he’s three,” she said to Hilfy, shutting the audio down for the moment. “Bring him up here.”

“Here, aunt?”

“You and Haral. This Outsider who tries to impress us with his seven hundred fifty-three words… we find out once for all how his public manners are. Take no chances, imp. If the translator fails, don’t; if he doesn’t act stable, don’t. Go.”

“Yes, aunt.” Hilfy stuffed the audio units and the other pager into her pockets, hastened out the archway in a paroxysm of importance.

“Huh,” Pyanfar said after her, stood staring in that direction. Her ears flicked nervously, a jangling of rings. The Outsider might do anything. It had chosen their ship to invade, out of a number of more convenient choices. It. He. Hilfy and the crew seemed unshakeably convinced of the he, on analogy to hani structure; but that was still no guarantee. There were, after all, the stsho. Possibly it made the creature more tragic in their eyes.

Gods. Naked-hided, blunt-toothed and blunt-fingered… It had had little chance in hand-to-hand argument with a clutch of kif. It should be grateful for its present situation.

No, she concluded. It should not. Everyone who got hands on it would have plans for this creature, of one kind and another, and perhaps it sensed that: hence its perpetually sullen and doleful look. She had her own plans, to be sure.

He, Hilfy insisted at every opportunity. Her first voyage, a tragic (and safely unavailable) alien prince. Adolescence. Gods.

From the main section of the com board, outside transmission buzzed, whined, lapsed into a long convolute series of wails and spine-ruffling pipings. She jumped in spite of herself, sat down, keyed in the translator on com. Knnn, the screen informed her, which she already knew. Song. No recognizable identity. No numerical content. Range: insufficient input.