I kept a light touch on his mind as he ate, as I would with any Sauk of my tribe. You might consider this unethical, but with a people who communicate almost exclusively with telepathy, knowing the thoughts and feelings of those around you is as important as knowing your own family as you sit around the kitchen table. Our body language is obvious to us; the twitch of an ear, flick of the tail, even the flaring of nostrils and wriggling of whiskers all have meaning. But beyond that is the knowing. The tribes must survive; and to survive, every member must know and trust every other member. Each knows the likes and dislikes, loves and fears of her neighbors. And so the Tribe works as a whole, each doing what they enjoy doing to help the tribe to live on.? Even the Sauk have the desire for privacy, however. All have the ability to erect shields within their minds that shutter their innermost thoughts from others; shields normally impermeable to ordinary sends but weak enough if the need is great to learn what is hidden. Sauk ethics and morals both demand that these shields not be assaulted unless and until there is need. In fact, in my memory the only time the Elder Priestess ever probed a sister was when that sister lay dying, unable to communicate neither the full extent of her injuries nor the cause of them.?That was also the only occasion I ever had to probe another’s body so deeply; and the first where I saved one from what should have been a mortal wound. By delving so deeply into her mind, I took control of her body and accelerated her healing by using both telekinesis and telepathy to clean, close and bind the wounds long enough for the tissues to knit and destroy the germs that would have infected the injury. She survived, but even so lay almost helpless for two hands of days while she recovered from the massive drain I had inflicted upon her and the wounds which would have torn open despite my efforts if she had not. To force such healing beyond that needed merely to seal the wounds could have killed her as certainly as though I had never attempted any healing at all. The effort was mine, but the energy was hers alone, and already critically low when the Elder Priestess bade me to try.? But this male who sat across from me would never be Sauk. His mind was so open to me that I could read much of his life and so learned more about this world than even he would ever know. And yet, there was so much more that I would learn later that proved him as young as I in spirit, if not in body. For now, just knowing that my quest could move forward was enough for me.?* * * * *? He ate slowly, watching me as I devoured the remaining portion of the first haunch. Despite my using my knife to cut pieces from the bone, there is always that which a knife cannot readily remove. So when I had it down to almost bare bone and joints, I lay my knife aside and proceeded to tear the remaining shreds from the joints with my teeth. The resulting image from his mind told me of seeing pictures of wolves and foxes doing the same, as well as his dog, the black-faced kit-like beast whenever a bone was tossed his way.? The second haunch remained cooking over the fire, my hunger assuaged for the moment but the lack of food for an unknown time before still leaving me feeling uncertain… almost drained of energy. I could wait to finish my dinner, but I would finish it, whether this male joined me or no. Now, however, I took up some dirt and rubbed the grease from my hands before dusting this off in a gesture familiar to all species I know. Even this male smiled at how normal this gesture appeared.? He remained silent as I sat across from him. I waited long enough that he began to feel uncomfortable and worried before I sensed that he was waiting for me to communicate instead. Gazing into his brown eyes I sent a feeling of enquiry, of questioning. Within that sending I included an image of himself as I saw him. I sent this as lightly as I could, gradually increasing the strength of the sending until he became aware of it with a start.?Almost, his mind fled, taking his body with it. As quickly, I sent feelings of calm and companionship, seeking to ease his panic; barely succeeding. I looked into his eyes again and brought my left hand up, to tap lightly at the side of my skull, then pointing to him. Again I sent my first query, this time pointing at him as he received this sending, telling him that what he was ‘hearing’ was coming from me. What I received in turn reinforced his earlier imagery. To him, I was a goddess.? I sent negation; showing him images of my tribe and myself as a youngling, but all I got in return was confusion and disbelief. This, in turn, confused me. How could he not believe what I sent him? I tried again, this time sending the images more slowly and emphasizing that I was young in the tribe, only just coming into adulthood and barely a quarter the age of the Elders. From him all I got was more confusion, though a glimmering of understanding. I watched as his mind seemed to ‘shift,’ his concepts slowly changed from the patterns of symbols I couldn’t understand to somewhat vague images, not as sharp as when he read my trail, but better able to match my own mental imagery albeit so much slower; as though communicating in this manner were alien to him.? I watched as he carefully built an image of himself. His efforts to focus on who he was sent brief flickers of memory to the surface. He counted time differently from the Sauk, roughly measuring his age by the cycles of the seasons counted by the turning of cold weather that turned the ground white, a mild season full of flowers and life—and storms barely equivalent to a summer shower on Sau’du, followed by a season of hot, baking sun that left the hills steaming and misty to the eye and finally into a cooling season where the trees lost their leaves in a blaze of color to leave the land bare in preparation for cold again. He counted four-hands-and-three of these cycles as his own age, three-and-four of his own five-fingered hands for comparison.?Each cycle brought memories of things I couldn’t believe; metals unlimited, moving pictures in a box that anyone could use, strange metal creatures that they pulled on its wings to climb inside in order to travel from place to place and push the wings open again to escape once they arrived. He even showed me, in his later years, the kind of winged creature I’d seen myself far above, wings of metal with big pods under each wing somehow providing power to push the thing through the air faster than even I could fly. At the last he showed me a thicker, lumbering-looking winged creature whose pods didn’t push, but with the aid of spinning feathers in front of them somehow pulled themselves through the air and carried massive objects in its belly for the purpose of excreting them over a desert to let them float down under a canopy of fine material and land relatively gently upon the landscape below. He even showed me how he himself ran out of the back of one of these creatures to float serenely to the ground.? His mind wandered then, and I watched as he recalled that he would be leaving his home soon, apparently to fight using these strange tools and creatures against people who did not believe as he did. Not that he wanted to fight, but rather that he felt it his duty as a native of this land and in a sense of justice against a people who used similar creatures to destroy twin monuments that somehow held thousands of lives within. While I didn’t understand everything, I saw a simile too close to the history of my own world. I had to warn him! But how? He still couldn’t understand me, though I was able to learn so much from him. I reached out my hand and lightly touched his knee, drawing his mind back into the present and his eyes to my own.? I slowly rose to my feet and invited him to join me, holding him at arms’ length and still gazing into his eyes. With slow, careful motions mirrored by my sending, I slipped my hand behind my leathers to scent my hand, then raised it towards him, palm down but open. His first reaction was a brilliant blush of heat in his face as he realized how I had scented my hand—a reaction I thought rather cute considering he had experienced things denied me. But he also understood the meaning better, recognizing my gestures as a formal greeting and introduction of myself to him more so than the first time, when he assumed a more generalized gesture and not its full meaning.? His mind blurred for a moment, flashing through thoughts at the speed of a Sauk as I watched him try to decide how to respond. His speed of thought encouraged me because I saw the potential the Goddess must have known in these people. “Welcome to Earth,” he said, his mind not quite sending an image of a sphere clothed mostly in blue with the lands colored in greens and browns somehow more muted than I expected. “I am called Edward Rain.” What he said with his mouth made no sense to me, naturally. Sauk rarely use their voices for communications. However, he took care to try to send images where he could to accompany his words so the general feel of his message came through clearly.? “I can’t just call you, ‘Smells-like-a-woman,’” he continued with another blush as his mind showed an image of a nose sniffing at a human woman, “and I don’t think you’d like, ‘Looks-like-a-Fox,” this time showing me the image of the small four-footed creature that I sensed previously.?“What should I call you?”? I studied at him for several heartbeats as I tried to make out the meaning of his thoughts. Then it came to me. He was asking for a vocalization to use as my name! My ears dipped back, then forward as I strove to create the sound that best represented who I was.? “Rhee Ahn,” I replied, the sounds blending into one similar to the word “Ed-ward” that he’d used to name himself.? “Rhiann?”? I nodded an affirmative, sending the feeling of acceptance at his pronunciation.
