Amdijefri spent many afternoons here. If there was a message waiting from the previous day, they would bring it up page by page and Amdi would copy and translate it. Then they would enter the questions and answers that Mr. Steel had talked to them about. Then there was a lot of waiting. Even if Ravna was watching at the other end, it could take several hours to get a reply. But the link was so much better than during the winter; they could almost feel Ravna getting closer. The unofficial conversations with her were often the high point of their day.
So far, this day had been quite different. After the false workers attacked, Amdijefri had the shakes for about half an hour. Mr. Steel had been wounded trying to protect them. Maybe there was nowhere that was safe. They messed with the outside displays, trying to peek through cracks in the rough planking of the compound's walls.
"If we'd been able to see out, we could have warned Mr. Steel," said Jefri.
"We should ask him to put some holes in the walls. We could be like sentries."
They batted the idea around a bit. Then the latest message started coming in from the rescue ship. Jefri jumped into the acc webbing by the display. This was his dad's old spot, and there was plenty of room. Two of Amdi slid in beside him. Another member hopped on the armrest and braced its paws on Jefri's shoulders. Its slender neck extended toward the screen to get a good view. The rest scrambled to arrange paper and pens. It was easy to play back messages, but Amdijefri got a certain thrill out of seeing the stuff coming down "live".
There was the initial header stuff — that wasn't so interesting after about the thousandth time you saw it — then Ravna's actual words. Only this time it was just tabular data, something to support the radio design.
"Nuts. It's numbers," said Jefri.
"Numbers!" said Amdi. He climbed a free member onto the boy's lap. It stuck its nose close to the screen, cross-checking what the one by Jefri's shoulder was seeing. The four on the floor were busy scratching away, translating the decimal digits on the screen into the X's and O's and 1's and deltas of Tines' base four notation. Almost from the beginning Jefri had realized that Amdi was really good at math. Jefri wasn't envious. Amdi said that hardly any of the Tines were that good, either; Amdi was a very special pack. Jefri was proud that he had such a neat friend. Mom and Dad would have liked Amdi. Still… Jefri sighed, and relaxed in the webbing. This number stuff was happening more and more often. Mom had read him a story once, "Lost in the Slow Zone", about how some marooned explorers brought civilization to a lost colony. In that, the heroes just collected the right materials and built what they needed. There had been no talk of precision or ratios or design.
He looked away from the screen, and petted the two of Amdi that were sitting beside him. One of them wriggled under his hand. Their whole bodies hummed back at him. Their eyes were closed. If Jefri didn't know better, he would have assumed they were asleep. These were the parts of Amdi that specialized in talking.
"Anything interesting?" Jefri said after a while. The one on his left opened its eyes and looked at him.
"This is that bandwidth idea Ravna was talking about. If we don't make things just right, we'll just get clicks and clacks."
"Oh, right." Jefri knew that the initial reinventions of radio were usually not good for much more than Morse code. Ravna seemed to think they could jump that stage. "What do you think Ravna is like?"
"What?" The scritching of pens on paper stopped for an instant; he had all of Amdi's attention, even though they'd talked of this before. "Well, like you… only bigger and older?"
"Yeah, but — " Jefri knew Ravna was from Sjandra Kei. She was a grownup, somewhere older than Johanna and younger than Mom. What exactly does she look like? "I mean, she's coming all this way just to rescue us and finish what Mom and Dad were trying to do. She must really be a great person."
The scritching stopped again, and the display scrolled heedless on. They would have to replay it. "Yes," Amdi said after a moment. "She — she must be a lot like Mr. Steel. It will be nice to meet someone I can hug, the way you do Mr. Steel."
Jefri was a little miffed by that. "Well wait, you can hug me!"
The parts of Amdi next to him purred loudly. "I know. But I mean someone that's a grownup… like a parent."
"Yeah."
