The monster slowly made the gesture for “yes,” then pointed at the bush and whistled “slen.” He was about to try the word for clith when the larger monster, which had been watching intently while keeping the muzzle of the rifle pointed at Ryo, suddenly walked over and touched the bush. It looked at Ryo, made a gargling sound, then pointed at Ryo and used some part of its internal mouth-parts to click, “Do you understand?”

Ryo was so overjoyed he almost forgot to make the gesture of affirmation. Then he said “slen” and tried to imitate the monster’s own mouth noise.

At that point the monsters made a whole series of very loud mouth noises accompanied by a great deal of mutual touching.

The whistles, he knew, were produced by forcing air past those soft mandibles. It took him a while and the patience of the smaller monster to discover how they produced their clicks. These sounds were softer than his own. Instead of grinding mandibles together as Thranx did, the monsters apparently utilized their peculiar mouth appendages against the upper parts of their jaws. The resultant words were sloppily executed but, if one paid attention, quite comprehensible.

The point of communication which had eluded them the longest, that of gesturing and posture, turned out to be the simplest for them to duplicate, once they began to understand that civilized speech was more than merely a matter of atmospheric modulation.

By the fifth day Ryo was imitating some of the monsters’ terms fairly well. As they marched they all engaged in an orgy of identification, beginning with the bush and working up to more complex terminology. Trouble was had with certain gestures because the monsters were short the correct number of limbs. They solved this by using one of their legs as an arm or sitting down to use all four limbs if a quadruple complicated movement was required.

By midmonth they were carrying on crude conversations. By the end of the month and yet another meal of carbonized emlib Ryo was convinced the authorities had given both him and the monsters up for dead.

The monsters were not members of different species, which was one thought he’d given some credence to. Like the Thranx their kind had two sexes, but the larger turned out to be a male, the smaller a female. Ryo readily accepted this mild perversion of the natural order. They were not, however, a mated pair, but simply members of the same ship’s crew. Their name sounds were “loo” and “bon- nie.” They did not have clan or hive names, only personal and family. Ryo allowed them the unusual familiarity of calling him by his personal name alone, since his full name verged on the unpronounceable for them.

He learned that their skin color and slight difference of eye shape were due to internal racial variations. Other things he already knew by observation, such as the fact that they were omnivorous.