Unearthly Neighbors by Chad Oliver Page B

much did you get from Larst?”
    “Plenty.”
    “Enough to talk with them?”
    “I think so. I already had a lot of stuff, and the old buzzard gave me enough of a key so that I can work out most of it. It’s a curious language—very weak in active verbs. But I can speak it now, after a fashion.”
    Monte felt a wave of relief. That was one bluff he had pulled with York that had panned out. They had the words, they had a bridge. “What the devil do they call Sirius Nine?”
    “That’s a tough one. They think of the world in a number of different ways, some of them pretty subjective. They do have a word, though— Walonka. It seems to mean a totality of some sort. It means the world, their universe, and it has an idea of unity, of interconnections. It’s the closest I can get. They don’t quite think in our terms. You know, of course, that it’s more than just a matter of finding different labels for the same thing—you have to dig up the conceptual apparatus that they work with. They call themselves Merdosi, the People. And they call those damned wolf-things by a very similar term: Merdosini. A rough translation would be something like ‘Hunters for the People.’ Interesting, huh?”
    “It makes sense. Did you get anything else suggestive?”
    “I got one thing. One of the words that Larst applied to himself has a literal meaning of man-who-is-old-enough-to-stay-in-the-village-all-year-round. What do you make of that?”
    Monte frowned. “It must mean that the younger men don’t stay in the village all the time. And that means—”
    “Yeah. When you noticed that none of the younger men were present, you were dead right. But it didn’t necessarily mean that we thought it meant—that they were out on a war party of some sort. The attack on our camp might not have been hooked up with their absence at all. Those guys are out in the woods most of the time—maybe they all live in trees like the man we tried to contact.”
    “But they must come into the village sometimes.”
    “ Obviously. There are kids running around. That would indicate at least occasional proximity.”
    “You think they have a regular mating season, something like that?”
    “I wouldn’t know. It’s a possibility. But it seems a little far-fetched for such an advanced form of life.”
    “It wouldn’t have to be strictly biological, though. Human beings do funny things sometimes. It might be a situation where there is some slight biological basis—females more receptive at certain times of the year—and then the whole business has gotten tangled up with a mess of cultural taboos. How does that strike you?” Charlie ground out his cigarette. “Well, it might explain a lot of things. The attack on the camp, for one.” Monte got to his feet, excited now. “By God, that’s it! How could we have been so stupid? And to think that I planned it that way—”
    “You didn’t know.”
    “But I did the worst possible thing! I set up our camp in a clearing, where they could watch us. I wanted them to see what we were like. And we had our women with us, all the time. We flaunted them. And then we went to the village with their women—”
    “You couldn’t have known.”
    Monte sat down again wearily. “Me, the great anthropologist! Any fool bonehead could have done better. I should have known—what was that guy doing in the tree by himself in the first place? We landed and the very first thing we did was to break the strongest taboo in their culture! It was just like they had landed in Chicago or somewhere and had promptly started to mate in the streets. My God!”
    “It’s something to think about. But that isn’t the whole answer.”
    “No, but it’s a lead! They don’t seem quite so unfathomable now. Charlie, I can crack that culture! I know I can.”
    Charlie lit another cigarette. “You’re going back there.” He said it as a simple statement of fact, not as a question.
    “Yes. I’ve got to give York a royal frosted