He sat on the cot, staring at the tochee, and gestured around expansively. “Go ahead.” The alien didn’t move. It kept its great front eye perfectly aligned on the human.
“All right then.” Ozzie went over to the security mesh and clicked the padlock’s combination code, covering the motion with his body. He still wasn’t that trusting. With the mesh open, he pulled out various articles, food, clothes, a kerosene lamp, his sewing kit, a handheld array, and set them down on the floor in front of the alien. The tochee’s locomotion ridges flattened slightly, lowering it down; then its manipulator flesh on the left side flowed out into a slim tentacle that picked up the array. The tip pressed each of the five buttons on top. But the unit remained dead.
“Ah-ha,” Ozzie said. Only someone familiar with technology would understand a button. “So you understand technology, but we can’t communicate. Why not?” He sat back on the cot and looked at the tochee again. It might be a human interpretation, but the alien seemed to slump in disappointment at the array’s failure. It slowly replaced it on the floor, little black fronds rustling like autumn leaves in a breeze.
“You don’t use sound, so what does that leave us with? Telepathy? Doubtful. Magnetic fields? Bees and trokken marshrats can sense them, but the Silfen are probably damping them here. Possible, then. Electromagnetic? Ditto for radio waves, the array is dead. Shapes? You’re visually perceptive, so that’s another possible. I can’t match that shapeshifting arm trick, though, and Sara said you didn’t understand pictures.” He cocked his head to one side. “Make that human pictures. I wouldn’t understand yours. That’s if you draw them. Now there’s a culture difference. Do you have art?” Ozzie stopped. He was feeling mildly foolish talking out loud to an alien that couldn’t hear. The tochee was still facing him, the front eye perfectly aligned. Ozzie shuffled a few inches along the cot. The tochee’s front body moved slightly, tracking him. “Why are you doing that? What can you be trying to say.”No, not what. How? Ozzie stared at that elongated oval of shiny black flesh that was pointing right at him. Not sound, but an emission of… “Shit.” He switched his retinal inserts to infrared, and the tochee’s body crawled with strange thermal signatures, hinting at the location of blood vessels and organs hidden below the flesh. He slowly worked up through the visual spectrum, until he reached ultraviolet. “Fuck!” Ozzie jumped backward in reflex shock, and fell off the cot.
The tochee’s forward eye was alive with complex dancing patterns of deep purple light shining straight at him.
When Orion returned to their rooms a couple of hours after lunch he found the tochee almost blocking the doorway. Ozzie was sitting on his cot, sketching furiously with a pencil on one of his notebooks. The rock floor was littered with scraps of paper, all with the weirdest patterns on them, like flowers drawn by a five-year-old, where every petal was represented by a jagged bolt of lightning.
“George Parkin’s been looking for you,” Orion began. “Why is that in here?”
Ozzie gave him a manic grin, his crazy hair fluffing out from his head as if he’d been hit by a big static charge. “Oh, me and Tochee here are just having a little chat.” He just couldn’t keep the smugness from his tone.
“Uh?” was all Orion managed.
Ozzie picked up one of the pieces of paper torn out of the notebook. The pattern was like a rosette of fractured glass, but there was a word scribbled on the top corner. Ozzie’s other hand held up a leather shoe. Half of the contents from their packs were scattered around. “This is its symbol for shoe,” he said jubilantly. “Yes, look, it’s repeating it. Course, it might just be the symbol for violated dead animal skin, but who the hell cares. We’re getting there. We’re building a vocabulary.”
Orion looked from Ozzie to the tochee. “Repeating what?”
“The symbol. There are other components to it, but they move the whole time. I can see them but I can’t draw them. So I’m just sticking to basics. I think the moving parts might be grammar codes, or context information.”
“Ozzie, what symbol?”
“Sit down, I’ll tell you.”
“It talks in pictures?” Orion asked ten minutes later.
“That’s the simple explanation, yes.”
“What’s the complicated one?”
“The pattern it projects is the visual language of the picture, sort of the same as we give names to objects. I imagine when two of them communicate together it’s extremely fast. There’s a lot of information in a pattern like that. I’m sure I’m only getting the fundamentals of it. In fact, I’m going to try and teach it the human alphabet. But I’m not surprised it didn’t understand the pictures Sara tried to draw for it, like the difference between drawing a stick man, and seeing a fully fledged color hologram of a man. Tochee will have to learn how to think down to our level, I’m afraid.”
“That’s good.”
“So why do you sound like it’s the world’s biggest bummer?”
