Diuturnity's Dawn Read Free

most other thranx. With his three sets of legs and greater endurance, over a distance he would catch up to and surpass her.
    Qinks and sprints, witticisms and woes, she reflected. All grist for the mill of diplomacy. Haflunormet felt similarly, though he was inherently more pessimistic than his human counterpart. Or maybe it was patience, she decided. Humans frequently mistook the immoderate patience of the intelligent arthropods for pessimism.
    “How are you coming with arranging that meeting we spoke about?” she asked him. In presenting the question, she employed a combination of human words and thranx words, clicks, and whistles. This useful and informal shorthand manner of speaking was gaining increasing favor among not only the diplomatic but the scientific staff at Azerick. Combined with thranx gestures and the resident humans’ best attempts to imitate these utilizing only two hands instead of four, it formed a kind of casual symbolic speech. This allowed thranx to practice their Terranglo and humans the opportunity to train their throats in the elaborate vocalizations of the thranx.
    “
Krrik,
it is proceeding slowly. Discouragingly so. I think the physicists are not the only ones who are absorbed in the study of inertia.” He glanced over and up at her to make sure she understood the last term correctly. As she did not immediately laugh in the human manner, he could not be certain she had understood his attempt at humor. Of all the humans he had met—admittedly this was not a large number—Anjou was the most consistently serious. Perhaps, he ruminated, this was why she got along so well with the thranx. To Haflunormet it appeared she sometimes acted in this manner to the detriment of her relationship with her fellow mammals.
    Watching her step easily alongside him, he tried to admire the play of her muscles, obscenely visible beneath the semitransparent epidermis. Diplomat or no, he found he could not do it. There was simply too much movement, too much visible play within the anatomical structure. In this it resembled that of the AAnn, but the reptiloids’ internal composition was concealed by tough, reflective, leathery scales. If a person peered closely at a human, individual blood vessels could be seen not only beneath the skin but forming rills and ridges above it. Their entire corporeal structure was, inarguably, turned inside out.
    He forced himself not to look away. It would be impolite. This female was his hive counterpart. Much as the sight unsettled his stomachs, he was determined to maintain visual contact. As to the sharp, distinctive, and wholly unpleasant smell that emanated from the biped, he steadfastly refused to dwell on it. No matter how their future relations evolved, he realized that there were some things that could not be changed through negotiation.
    He worked to pay attention, realizing that the tottering upright stinking blob was speaking. No, he corrected himself resolutely: It was a graceful, fluid biped who was addressing him. Formal diplomacy aside, the thranx were exceedingly polite: a consequence of having evolved in surroundings so confined that humans could not even conceive of the social forces that had been at work. To the thranx, of course, they did not seem confined at all, but perfectly normal and natural. It was wide-open aboveground spaces that tended to occasionally make them nervous. Consequently, their conquest of space had been a more impressive feat than that of humans. Psychology was harder to engineer than spacecraft.
    Anjou was deep in thought as they turned a bend in the trail. Eint Carwenduved was Haflunormet’s superior. Because of the rigid thranx chain of diplomatic command, only she could properly accept a formal proposal from the Terran government and pass it on to the Grand Council for discussion and consideration. It had taken a select group of forward-thinking statespeople from half a dozen human settled worlds almost two years to finally hammer out