Take up the White Man’s burden-
Send forth the best ye breed-
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need:
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!
Rudyard Kipling “The White Man’s Burden”
“The United States and the Philippine Islands, 1899”
Knowledge is valuable when charity informs it.
St. Augustine, City of God
Through the windows they could see the beheaded corpse of Hecate.
A scar gaped along half its length: the gap where Hecate’s cabin had been. The rest of the hull had been mounted alongside a silver sausage, one of their captors’ ships. It flew three hundred meters distant, keeping pace with their own captor. A slender spine projected aft. The drive flame was a faint violet-white glow running along the spine.
Hecate’s severed cabin rode the flank of another such sausage. From inside they could see almost nothing of that: just a silver membrane bulging with fluid, centimeters away, and a rigid cabin forward.
But they saw Hecate’s host ship well enough. Freddy had set their remaining telescope to following it. The sausage was banded with color-coded lines and chains of handholds and catwalks, and Moties. The maze ran round Hecate, too. Moties in pressure suits moved over the hull like lice
They found the lightsail, Freddy’s spinnaker. In minutes they had spread several acres of silver film to inflate ahead of the nose.
“That won’t add much to the thrust,” Jennifer said. “Why . . .”
“Why not? It’s there,” Terry Kakumi said. “Blink and it’s a signal device, blink again and it’s heat shielding. They do love to fiddle.”
“It’ll heat their cabin some,” Freddy said.
Hecate rotted before their eyes. Engineers and tiny Watchmakers stripped away sections of hull and plated them over their own ship. They found automated cameras at nose and tail and amidships, an officially approved model, all identical, which the Moties seemed to find confusing. Hecate’s fuel tank they studied and then left intact. They worked inside the cut end until the Engineer was able to pull loose a glass tank festooned with tubing- “Dammit. That’s our sewage recycling system,” Freddy said.
“We’ll starve.”
“We have the goodies locker,” Jennifer said. “A week’s supplies, maybe.”
“It’s a double time limit. Will the sewage crowd us out before we starve for lack of basic protocarb? Stay tuned.”
The men were edgy, talking to distract themselves. But Jennifer was calm, even happy, cradling a six-kilogram alien who clung to her with three arms, watching her face intently, sometimes trying to imitate the sounds she made. And Glenda Ruth . . . was frightened when she thought about it, and frustrated, and uncomfortable; and alive as never before, playing a game she’d begun learning in the cradle.
She worked on Freddy’s back, running her thumbs along basic shoulder muscles, probing deep. Freddy subsided with a grunt of unwilling satisfaction. He asked, “Do you suppose they’ll keep the data cubes? I’ve got some good recordings of the battle.”
Hecate dwindled. They took half the hull to make a curved mirror to relay light from the light-sail. Kilometers of wiring went into the nose of the captor craft. A small craft arrived from somewhere else; some of the wiring, four cameras, and all of Hecate’s little attitude jets went aboard; the Engineer pilot traded places with a replacement, and away it went.
The Moties exposed Hecate’s drive; moved it aft; set it to firing.
Then they were all over it, tuning, testing. Presently their own drive went off, leaving Hecote’s running.
“Something of a compliment,” Glenda Ruth said. Freddy nodded.
Jennifer asked, “Does it bother you? Hecate...”
Freddy’s shoulders set hard. He said, “Not all that much. A racing yacht, we change anything at the slightest excuse. The idea’s to win. It’s not like”-to Glenda Ruth-“not like your dad losing his battleship, his first command.”
“He still flinches if you mention MacArthur.” Glenda Ruth resumed trying to soften the knots in Freddy’s shoulders.
They could hear the rustling. Engineers and Watchmakers were moving over the surface of their own life bubble. What was happening out there?
“Then again, Hecate is where you and I got together. I do hate-“
“The bed’s quite safe.”
His tension softened. “We get it back from Balasingham, we can build a ship around it.”
The Mediator pup looked into Jennifer’s eyes and said, distinctly. “Go eat.” Jennifer let go, and the pup pushed off from Jennifer’s chest, setting her rotating, sailing unerringly to impact the Engineer.
The cabin was aswarm with Moties. The Warrior would remain in place for minutes at a time, then bound about the cabin like a spider on amphetamines, and presently come to rest again. The Engineer and three skinny half-meter Watchmakers, and a slender creature with a harelip and long, delicate fingers and toes, had reshaped the hole in the cabin wall into an oval airlock. The Engineer had found the safe near the cabin’s forward cone, tapped at the code readout, then left it alone. Now the Moties had peeled the cabin walls away and were going through the air and water regeneration systems. From time to time there came a whiff of chemical strangeness.
“Too many of them. They’ll strain the air changers,” Freddy said.
“I think that one’s a doctor,” Jennifer said. “Look at the fingers. And the Motie nose is in the roof of the mouth. That thing’s got enhanced smell and surgeon’s fingers. There was a Doctor caste on Mote Prime.”
“Maybe several.”
“Right. And between them, the Doctor and the Engineer are going to decide how to keep us alive. I’ve got to say I don’t like that.”
Now the three Watchmakers were moving about the cabin drawing green lines. They squeezed the stuff out of what the Navy would have called ration tubes. The patterns weren’t complex enough to be writing. The Watchmakers covered the walls with lines and curves, and presently converged where the sewage recycling system had been.
Freddy asked, “Why not, Jennifer? The way you and Glenda Ruth talk, these Moties can do anything, including keep humans healthy.”
“But it’s all very basic, isn’t it? Nothing like the castle they built for us on Mote Prime.”
“It’s a battle fleet, not a city,” Glenda Ruth said.
Terry Kakumi snapped, “It’s a poor little pathetic battle fleet. Look at them, Jennie. Tiny little ships, mostly tank, big cabins because there are too many of the buggers, motors that do a meter per sec squared at best. What’s left for weapons? Are they supposed to make them on the spot?
“What would a real fleet be like, Jennie? Rape my lizard, what couldn’t we build with Motie Engineers at the Yards? They’re church-rat poor. We’ve been captured by BuReloc transportees! They’re stripping our car and fixing our life support with borrowed chewing gum and string!”
Jennifer giggled. “Bag ladies with borrowed chewing gum. I love it!”
Glenda Ruth felt herself bristling, as if these were her Moties. But she could feel it: Terry was right. “What can we do?”
“Talk to them, Glenda Ruth. Tell them we’re worth the price of their last coin,” Terry said. “Tell them to pull the pea out from all those mattresses, I’m just a pathetic mass of bruises. Explain ransom to them. Or they’ll let us strangle.”
She said, “These don’t talk. We’ll have to wait.”
The new East India Mediator was old, as old as Eudoxus, with gray streaks at the muzzle and along the flanks. She was escorted into the chamber by a Warrior and a younger Mediator, who both left quickly.
When she was presented to Horace Bury, the trader flinched. Chris Blaine moved closer and saw what the Motie was carrying. “A newborn?” he asked, and watched Bury relax. Of course Bury took it for a Watchmaker.
The aged Mediator examined the humans and turned toward Bury radiating delighted surprise. “Excellency! I had never dared hope to meet you in person, even when it became known that you were again in the Mote system. I have thought long on the name I would give myself and have chosen Omar rather than something more pretentious. It is my greatest pleasure finally to meet you.”
Bury bowed slightly. “I am pleased to have had such apt students.”
“And my new apprentice. We have not chosen a name, but-“
“You presume,” Eudoxus said. “We too have new apprentices, and we are eager to introduce them to His Excellency.”
Of course.” Omar turned to Wordsworth and began to speak.
“Hracht!” Eudoxus looked pleased. “We agreed that all conversation will be in Anglic. This means yours as well, does it not?”
Wordsworth was about to speak, but some gesture from Omar silenced her. “I would prefer rigid rules to no rules,” Omar said. “Very well, I will receive my information for all to hear. Where do matters stand now?”
“Not good not bad,” Wordsworth said. “We make progress, agree that East India will have honored place, second to Medina but only to Medina.”
The Mediator pup was staring intently at Horace Bury. The trader was not annoyed. Interesting...
“Progress indeed,” Omar said. “And how will all this be accomplished?”
Chris Blaine smiled thinly. “Not all details have been resolved,” he said. “Yet we can agree, there has never been a better time to unite all Moties. Mote Prime is not a factor. The Empire has many ships. With Medina and East India, and allies you may bring...”
Omar moved closer to Bury. The Mediator pup stretched toward him. Absently Bury’s hand reached out, touched the pup’s fur, drew back.
“Excellency,” Omar said. “Let us speak seriously. Medina and East India are powerful if united, yet it must be obvious to all that even united we are not the greatest power among the space dwellers.”
“King Peter wasn’t the most powerful Master on Mote Prime,” Chris Blaine said.
Bury spoke softly. “Medina and East India were the first to understand the implications of the protostar. Your ships even now negotiate with the Empire. Why should you not have the rewards of prescience?” He deliberately scratched behind the pup’s oversize ear. “May I choose a name? Ali Baba, I think.” Bury smiled. “Of course there is a small favor we require.”
Eudoxus said, “We have begun to speak with the Crimean Tartars. It goes slowly. They know only obsolete languages.”
“Obsolete to you,” Omar said. “Not to us. One of my sisters has spoken with the Tartars, and I received word moments before I landed here. Excellency, the Tartars are afraid. They find that every Motie’s hand is against them, and they do not know what they have. Only that it is important, and holding it is dangerous.”
“They’re holding a wolf by the ears,” Joyce said.
The hull clonked
In Hecate’s cabin, they waited.
A Warrior bounded through the new air lock, scuttled about the cabin, and presently settled. It exchanged words with the Warrior already present. It emitted a warbling whistle.
Other Moties entered: a Master, a meter and a half tall and clad in thick white fur, and a smaller Motie furred in a dense brown-and-white pattern: a Mediator.
“We’re in business,” Glenda Ruth said.
Two Engineers followed, towing a glass cylinder with green goo sloshing in it: Hecate’s sewage recycler. Six-fingered hands had been at work on it, but it didn’t seem greatly changed.
“Another compliment,” Freddy said. “Given what that cost me, I’d have been surprised if they could make it much more efficient.”
Glenda Ruth felt Freddy’s relief; she even shared it. Their life spans had just been extended by several weeks. More important was the timing.
“We thank for glorious gift,” she said in the language Jock and Charlie had taught her, King Peter’s language, from Mote Prime.
The Mediator’s stance indicated receptivity but no understanding.
Damn! But free-fall might alter a Motie’s body language. (Stance, indeed!) Or her words might be wrong, or her own gestures. How would a crippled Mediator speak, one with a missing arm?
Two of those little Moties with the Engineers weren’t Watchmakers; they were Mediator pups. Jennifer waved. The larger pup jumped across ten meters of space, impacted, and clung. Jennifer wasn’t having trouble communicating.
Okay. Glenda Ruth released her seat belts to give her body full play, worked her foot under a strap for anchorage, and said, palms facing out, regal-but-unarmed. “Our lives much improved by generous-“
The Moties converged on her.
Glenda Ruth had to remember to resume breathing. She was very aware of the spiky Warriors. They shifted constantly to keep a free path between prisoners and weapons. The four humans held quite still as six-fingered hands moved over them.
They had guessed this might happen. Glenda Ruth’s mother, the only woman aboard MacArthur, had stripped so that Moties could learn something of human anatomy. Jennifer wanted that slot for herself.
It didn’t matter. The caste that Jennifer thought was a Doctor moved in with the Engineer, and they peeled Hecate’s crew like bananas. The humans had to help in self-defense. The Doctor shied back from waves of alien pheromones, then sniffed dutifully. It had been many hours since there was a shower aboard Hecate.
Jennifer blushed and twitched at tickle points. Freddy thought it was funny and was trying to hide it. Terry’s rounded nudity didn’t bother him, but his hyperawareness of the Warriors’ guns was driving Glenda Ruth nuts. She tried not to flinch at the touch of Motie hands. Dry. Hard. Right hands felt like a dozen twigs gliding over her face, seeking the muscles that make the front of a human head into a signaling system. The left hand clamped like a vise to hold her arm or leg or torso to be probed.
They turned and twisted for the Doctor. The Mediator and Master hung back, watching.
Human vertebrae fascinated them, as they had thirty years before, when MacArthur’s crew met Moties from Mote Prime. Evolution had not taken that path on the Mote. Motie life-forms had spines of solid bone and heavy, complex joints.
The brown-and-white pup jumped from human to human, sniffing, feeling, comparing. Even the Master, judging it safe, moved forward to run its right hands along Glenda Ruth’s spine. Jennifer collapsed in giggling that was half sobs, sandbagged by everyone’s favorite memory from Summer Vacation.
(Outside the museum on Mote Prime, a Master’s dozen fingers explored Kevin Renner’s back. Renner shifted in delight. “Right! A little lower. Okay, scratch right there. Ahh!”)
They couldn’t talk under such circumstances. Glenda Ruth tried. They had to educate the Mediator, give it words to learn . . . but the others’ embarrassment was just too strong. Glenda Ruth quickly gave up.
The Doctor and Engineer began talking to the Master. Pointing, demonstrating, explaining. The white-furred Motie took it all in. It asked short questions (that one inflection, query, brought verbal responses, where another, command, caused action), and the Moties resumed their examination. One question sent the Engineer to join its Watchmakers at work in the air recycler. Another had it comparing Freddy and Terry, Jennifer and Glenda Ruth. Hands. Hair. Toes. Spines again. Genitals (will you stop that giggling?)
The Mediator watched.
And finally they were allowed, to put their clothes on. They found it hard to look at each other. The Master and its attendants were still talking.
“We should have guessed,” Glenda Ruth said. “Masters do talk. It’s different from the Mediator skill. They have to organize data from a dozen different castes . . . professions.”
Clothed, it was all right to speak again. Jennifer said, “I think the Doctor’s nearsighted. In a surgeon that’s probably good.”
The adult Mediator took the second Mediator pup from its Engineer parent. She crossed to the bridge, caught herself, and offered the little Motie to Freddy: clearly an offer, not a demand.
Freddy looked at Glenda Ruth. He was showing surprise, no distaste, and a touch of hope. She said, “Take it.” Why Freddy? Freddy immediately reached out, smiling, and accepted the thing into his arms.
Why Freddy? Why not me?
It clung with five limbs, its hands exploring Freddy’s head and shoulders, where his skin was exposed. Presently it pulled back to watch his face. Moties caught on to that one quick, the notion of a mobile face. Why not me, or Terry?
The Master spoke. The Engineer led the Mediator to the door. The Mediator began playing with the code readout.
“Damn,” Glenda Ruth said. The others looked at her.
If she let the others know exactly what she had in mind, a Mediator would know it now or later. Could she get some help on this? She pointed at the safe and shouted, “Show signs of distress, dammit! It’s too soon!”
Distress, right. Freddy spasmed, pointed to the safe with an outflung arm, and flung the other across his averted eyes, crying, “Weep! Wail!” Glenda Ruth choked back a laugh. The pup was trying to imitate him, right arms pointing, left across its eyes.
Terry’s hand closed on her ankle. “The Warriors.”
“They-“ She looked. They would, “Freddy love, cut it.”
“What was that about?”
She shook her head. “Anyway, you made the point.”
One of the Warriors scuttled forward and anchored itself next to the safe, gun pointed back toward the humans.
The safe door slid open. A Watchmaker scuttled in. It handed out a laboratory sealed-environment jar as large as itself, then a plastic jar of dark powder, a stack of documents, a roll of gold coins.
The Engineer examined the gold and said something to the Master. The Master answered.
The Engineer put the papers back, and the cocoa. It examined the jar.
“Don’t touch that!” Glenda Ruth shouted. No Motie would understand, but the Mediator would remember.
The Engineer opened the seals.
There was a pop. The Warrior’s head snapped around to catch the same puff of gas that caught the Engineer. Glenda Ruth wondered if they would be shot.
The Warriors didn’t shoot. The Engineer took a scraping from the sludge in the jar, then resealed it and put it back. It left the door open. It spoke a word and tossed the gold at one of the Watchmakers, who caught it and jumped through the new airlock.
The other Engineers had reattached the sewage recyling system where six lines of graffiti-green met in a sunburst. They continued to work on it, add a pipe here, bend, constrict. The Warriors maintained their stations. When Glenda Ruth kicked herself forward to the safe, she could feel phantom bullets. The Warriors came alert; the Master gave no signal that she could recognize; but no Motie stopped her
Thanks to the Moties’ parsimonious lowering of cabin pressure, the canister’s pressure had sprayed perhaps 10 percent of the encysted eggs of the Crazy Eddie Worm into the cabin as an aerosol. Most of the contents were intact. There was a mild odor of petroleum and other pollutants, the natural state of water on Mote Prime, fading rapidly as the air filters did their work. The Moties clearly didn’t like the smell any more than the humans did. It wouldn’t have bothered planet-dwelling Moties.
They’ve evolved in space, Glenda Ruth thought. Space-dwelling Moties who don’t detest pollution will die of it.
Glenda Ruth carefully wiped the rim and resealed the canister, and glared at the Engineer. It might be vital to be able to claim that the Moties had been infected by accident.
Then she suppressed a shudder: a hundred wormlets would hatch and die in her lungs.
Thirty years before, Whitbread’s asteroid-mining Engineer had been infected with the parasitic worm. MacArthur’s biologists determined that it couldn’t infect humans and labeled it Form Zeta, the sixth living thing they’d found during autopsy on the Engineer. Present, not in large numbers, but present.
Jock and Charlie and Ivan carried it in greater numbers, and they didn’t care any more than humans care about E. Coli. Parasite Zeta did no harm beyond consuming a few calories; which was why the Blaine Institute biologists had used it as the base for their genetic engineering experiments.
It would be interesting to know if the parasite was normal among these space-evolved Moties. Not that it mattered: surely it would live, and this worm was different. And it would not survive in human lungs, but just the thought-
The Mediator spoke at her shoulder, and she jumped. It said, “Mediators talk. No Horace Bury Fyunch(click), but we talk.”
“Good,” said Glenda Ruth. “Let’s talk. Please leave our trade goods alone. This is all we have to bargain with. It should not be ruined.”
And now the Crazy Eddie Worm was growing in an Engineer, a female. Had the Warrior been female, too? Would it affect these Watchmakers?
How many Masters were aboard? Too many, of course, more than their captors would actually want, but . . . three? Four? And the clock was counting down.
“Your Lordship’s presence is requested,” the voice said. “My Lord. My Lord, I must insist. Rod Blaine, wake up, dammit!”
Rod sat bolt upright. “All right, already.”
“What is it?” Sally asked. She sat up with a look of concern. “The children...”
Rod spoke to the ceiling. “Who?”
“Lord Orkovsky. He says the situation is urgent,” the telephone said.
Rod Blaine swung his feet over the edge of the bed and found his slippers. “I’ll talk to him in the study. Send coffee.” He turned to Sally. “Not the kids. The Foreign Secretary wouldn’t call us in the middle of the night about that.” He went across the hail to his study and sat at his desk. “I’m here. No visuals. All right, Roger, what’s up?”
“The Moties are loose.”
“How?”
“Actually, it’s not quite that bad.” Lord Roger Orkovsky, Secretary of State for External Affairs, sounded like a diplomat under stress. “You’ll recall there was some question of when Dr. Buckman’s protostar would collapse.”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Well, it’s happened, and the Moties were ready for it. Due to some clever thinking-Chris is mentioned in the dispatches-Mercer had sent everything he could scrape up out to where the new Alderson point would form, so we were ready, too. Almost ready.
“Details later. We got a whole bunch of reports at once, about stellar geometry and such. You’ll have to read them all. What’s important is that there are some Motie ships with an ambassador on board cooling their heels under Navy detention while we decide what to do about them. And Mercer wants a battle fleet.”
Rod was aware that Sally had come up behind him. “Roger,” she said.
“Good morning, Sally. Sorry to yank you up like this-“
“Are the children all right?”
“I was just getting to that,” Orkovsky said. “We don’t know. Chris volunteered to be Navy liaison aboard Bury’s ship-Sinbad. Commodore Kevin Renner commanding.”
“Commodore.”
“Yeah, that’s complicated, too.”
“So they went into the Mote System,” Rod said.
“Right. Sinbad, a light cruiser-Atropos, Commander Rawlins- and a Motie ship. The reports say the first person the Moties wanted to talk to was Horace Bury.”
“Roger, that doesn’t make sense,” Sally said.
“Maybe not, but it’s true. Look, I better give you the rest of this. There’ll be a cabinet meeting in the Palace in two hours. We want you there. Both of you. Matter of fact, we want you back on the Motie Commission. You were going back to New Caledonia anyway, now the government will pay for getting you there. The Navy will have a ship ready by the time you get to the Palace.”
“We can’t leave so soon!” Rod said.
“Yes, we can,” Sally said. “Roger, thanks. You mentioned Chris. What about Glenda Ruth?”
“That was the last message in the stack,” Orkovsky said. “Sally, a hundred hours after Sinbud went into the Mote system, Freddy Townsend took his yacht through. Glenda Ruth was aboard.”
“I want his name,” Sally said.
“Huh?”
“Whoever let them through. There’s got to be a Navy man in charge out there, and he let our daughter go into the Mote system in an unarmed yacht. I want his name.”
“Sally...”
“Yes, I know, he thought he had a good reason.”
“Maybe he did.”
“It wouldn’t matter, would it? When was the last time you won an argument with her? I still want his name. Fyunch(click)!”
“Yes, madame?”
“Is our car ready?”
“Yes, madame.”
“Tell Wilson we’ll be leaving in an hour. Get clearances for the west entrance to the Palace.”
“Yes, madame.”
“So what do we take?” Sally said. “Jock. Fyunch(click), we want to talk to Jock. Wake him up, but check with the doctors first.”
“Good thinking,” Rod said. “Sally, we can’t take him with us.”
“No, but we can get him to record something to prove he’s still alive,” Sally said.
“What?” Rod held a sheath of facsimile papers. “The last report says, and I quote: ‘The Hon. Glenda Ruth Blaine, on the basis of brief conversations with the Motie representatives, has concluded that although these Moties know Anglic and have some familiarity with the Empire, they are not part of any Motie group previously encountered.’ I don’t think they believe her.”
“More fools they.”
“Madame,” the ceiling said. “Jock has been awakened. Do you want visuals?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Brown and white fur streaked with gray. “Good morning, Sally. If you don’t mind, I’ll have chocolate while we talk.”
“By all means. Good morning. Jock, the Moties are loose.”
“Ah?”
“You knew about the protostar.”
“I know what you have told me about the protostar. You said that it would collapse within the next hundred years. I take it that was wrong? That it has already happened?”
“You got it,” Rod said. “Jock, we have a problem. Moties that Glenda Ruth believes aren’t part of King Peter’s group have got out of the Mote system. So far they appear to be stuck in a red dwarf backwater, but we all know the Empire can’t keep up two blockades.”
“And you and Sally have been given the problem of what to do about the Moties,” Jock said. “Have they made you an admiral yet?”
“No.”
“They will. And they’ll give you a fleet.” Jock’s hand moved expressively. “At least it’s not Kutuzov. Of course they want you to leave immediately. I am afraid I cannot accompany you.”
“No, the Jump shock would kill you.”
“Are the children well? They must have involved themselves by now.”
Sally said, “They’ve gone to the Mote.”
“I did not think you could surprise me,” Jock said, “But you have. I see. Give me an hour. I will make what records I can.”
“In what language?” Rod asked.
“In several. I will need recent pictures of Chris and Glenda Ruth, as well as of myself.”
“We have a meeting.”
“Of course. We will discuss this when you’re done with that.”
The Motie paused, and somehow the Motie smile was a grin of triumph. “So the horse learned to sing after all.”
“I hadn’t expected this,” Jennifer said. “We’re infested with Moties! Freddy . . . Freddy, I can’t keep thinking of this ship as Hecate!”
Freddy Townsend looked around. “Yeah. Hecate’s cabin mounted on a ship of unknown name. Bandit-One? And we’ll just hang numbers on the rest of the fleet.”
Glenda Ruth said, “We could ask-“
And she shied back before he snarled, “I won’t ask Victoria. She’d give us the name of this Motie ship, like we’re strap-on cargo.”
Jennifer said, “A two-headed ship. Two captains. We’ve never seen the Master that gives the orders. Cerberus?”
Five Watchmakers, two Warriors, three Engineers nursing two Mediator pups, the old Mediator they now called Victoria, a Master, a Doctor, and a lean, spidery variant that scuttled back and forth through Cerberus’s big new airlock, perhaps bearing messages, had all made their nests in the cabin.
The change had come gradually, while they slept. Glenda Ruth remembered waking from time to time in a shifting pattern of variously shaped Moties. Twelve hours of that, then she woke choking and weeping. The Doctor had examined them and then meeped at the young male Master they’d named Merlin, who warbled at the engineers, who readjusted the air and sewage recyclers until the air was back to standard . . . but it was still thick with Motie smells, and every human’s eyes were still red.
The green strips painted along the walls had grown into vines, furry green tubes as thick Glenda Ruth’s leg. The various Moties used the lines to mark off their territories
They’d turned Cerberus’s original airlock into a toilet: one toilet with a variety of attachments. The Engineers had worked on Cerberus’s original toilet, too. It worked better now.
“They’ve put screens up. Both toilets,” Glenda Ruth “We’re talking now.”
“Can you tell them to leave us some room?”
“I’ll give it another try, but you can guess the answer. This much is more personal room than they’ve ever seen in one spot.”
An Engineer arrived with food. All of the Moties converged except one Warrior. Glenda Ruth said, “Jennifer, go and see what they’re eating.”
The meal was democratic: the young Master called Merlin supervised distribution and sent a Watchmaker with food for the Warrior on guard. Merlin looked around when Jennifer came near. Victoria said he was a young male; this was not obvious, given he was helping to nurse the Mediator pups. The human presence didn’t disturb him. Jennifer looked about her; spoke a few words to Victoria.
The Mediator swam to join Glenda Ruth. Victoria had been learning Anglic much faster than Glenda Ruth could learn Oort Cloud Recent.
She said, “About food? I think, thought you have your own.”
“I’d like to know if this is like what we eat,” she told it.
“Will ask Doctor and Engineer.”
“I would like to feed you cocoa.”
“Why?”
“On the planet they liked cocoa. If you like cocoa, we have something to trade.”
“You said, what is in safebox is trade goods. We should not take without giving. Cocoa in safe?”
“Yes.”
Victoria brought her flat face close. “Trade space with us! Past the starhole is all the worlds, all within your gripping hand. Give us the worlds, take what you want. Take tools you see, tell tools you want, Engineers make that. Take any caste of us, tell what shape and kind you want, you wait, your children will have.”
Glenda Ruth said, “This is not so simple. We know how your numbers grow.”
Stillness.
“We think we have an answer, but it’s still not easy. Many Motie families will need to work together. As Moties do not always do.”
“Glenda Ruth, who is Crazy Eddie you speak of?”
Glenda Ruth was only surprised for a moment. “Planet-dwelling Moties told us about Crazy Eddie. Maybe you know him with another name.”
“Maybe”
“Crazy Eddie isn’t one person, he is a kind of person. The kind who . . . who tries to stop change when change is too massive to stop.”
“We tell children about Sfufth, who throws away garbage because it smells bad.”
“Something like that.” Sfufth? Shifufsth? She couldn’t quite make that sound.
Jennifer had rejoined them, and now she carried the older pup. She said, “We had a very powerful Master, long ago. Joseph Stalin had the power of life and death over all of his people, in hundreds of millions.” Jennifer glanced at Glenda Ruth: stop or go? Uncertain, Glenda Ruth nodded.
Jennifer went on, “Advisers told Stalin that there was a shortage of copper tube in his domain. Stalin gave his orders. Everywhere across a tenth of the land area of our world, what was made of copper was melted down to make tubes. Communication lines disappeared. Tractor parts, other tools. Wherever copper was needed, it was made pipes instead.”
“Sfufth. We know him,” Victoria said. “Sfufth is found everywhere, in every caste. Sfufth breeds Watchmakers for sale to other nests. No need for cage, they take care of selves.”
Jennifer was delighted. “Yes! There’s a painting in a museum on Mote Prime.” She was about to convey an unfortunate nuance, and Glenda Ruth couldn’t stop her. “A burning city. Starving Moties in riot. A Mediator stands on a car to be seen and heard and shouts, ‘Return to your tasks!’”
Victoria nodded head and shoulders. “When possibilities close, Crazy Eddie doesn’t see.”
Glenda Ruth said, “In Stalin’s domain, fifty years after. Things changed. More communication, better tools and transport. Their Warriors ate half their resources for all that long time, but the weapons they made were second best. Lesser domains began splitting off. Some older Masters acted to take charge of the domain and turn it all back. The Gang of Crazy Eddies.”
Had she got her point across? Years of watching Jock and Charlie weren’t helping enough. Too much of Mediator body language was conscious; was arbitrary. She said, “When possibilities open, Crazy Eddie doesn’t see.”
The Mediator thought that over. She said. “Make cocoa to look at first. For safety.”
For poison, she meant.
So Freddy made cocoa for the four of them-“Make it hot,” Glenda Ruth whispered-and an extra bulbful for analysis.
“Too hot,” Victoria said when she touched it. She gave it to the Engineer, who carried it into the hidden part of Cerberus. The human crew huddled with their heads together, sipping, their shoulders shutting out the aliens around them. Freddy had a crime drama running on a monitor; Victoria might have been watching it, and Merlin watched intermittently, but no human was.
“How are you doing?” Freddy asked.
Glenda Ruth said, “I’m dancing as fast as I can, but the pace is too damned slow. Jennifer, what were they eating?”
Jennifer was running her hand along the pup’s back as if it were a cat; but her hand kept stopping to feel the weird geometry. She said, “Just one dish. A gray crust around gray-green paste that looked a lot like basic protocarb.”
“Jen, did it steam? Was it hot?”
“It wasn’t hot. What do you want to know?”
She dared not tell them too much, but she had to know this. “Do they cook?”
“Glenda Ruth, the air coming through the new lock is warmer than it is here, but there’s no smell of cooking.”
“Okay.” She looked at the faces around her. Open, honest faces shadowed by every passing thought. Did they understand, would they reveal, too much?
Engineer and Warrior were certainly infected. The worm eggs might well infect every Motie form in Cerberus’s cabin. If that didn’t reach a Master, then an Engineer might have passed it on by now. But if a Mediator wasn’t infected soon . . . there wouldn’t be anything to talk about. Just a Master turned sterile male, and other forms showing the same symptoms, and the blame very clear.
And in that state of nature, no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitarv, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
From the beginning Freddy Townsend had been concerned about his equipment. “I know we’re prisoners,” he told Victoria as soon as the Mediator would understand. “I know you can take what you want.”
“Leave your stuff alone if play to win,” Victoria said. Need some stuff for now.”
“Good. You think about future. You want us happy for future?”
“Say instead we want you not hating us for future.”
“Good. Good. Then get them to leave my telescope the hell alone! It’s this whole complex, here and here, all this stuff-“
“Engineers make it better.”
“Don’t want better. Want this stuff the way it is,” Freddy said distinctly. He had watched what happened to Hecate. He believed-and so did Glenda Ruth-that the Moties would strip the telescope of anything they wanted, leaving a tube and two lenses to be improved to their hearts’ content.
They must have convinced Victoria; Victoria must have convinced one of the Masters. Days later, the scope and its computerized direction-finding and data-recording systems still matched Empire racing specs.
Freddy’s fingers behind her ear teased Glenda Ruth awake.
The smaller pup was clinging to his back, a tiny skewed head above his left shoulder, wearing the generic smile; but Freddy looked quite solemn. Glenda Ruth followed his pointing finger to a screen and . . . what? Display of a broken kaleidoscope? Numbers indicated that she was looking aft, under one-hundred-power magnification, via Freddy’s telescope.
“We’re decelerating. Whole fleet. To that,” Freddy said.
A shattered mirror on star-dusted black . . . mirrors, lots of mirrors, circles and ribbons and scraps and one great triangle. The mirrors weren’t rotating, but some of what they illuminated was, on an eccentric axis. Sunlight off the mirrors set it to glowing like the City of God.
“Schizophrenia City,” Jennifer said.
Glenda Ruth winced. “Pandemonium,” she said. John Milton’s capital of Hell. If this was Captor Fleet’s home base, they were indeed mad.
Pandemonium was backlit, showing mostly black, but she could see the lack of pattern. There were blocks and spires and tubes, considerable fine structure, very spread out. As an artistic whole . . . it wasn’t whole.
Jennifer said, “Cities do grow this way, if there’s no street plan. But in space? That’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous,” her pup said emphatically. Freddy’s pup peeked out of his arms and nodded wisely.
Glenda Ruth called, “Victoria?”
“Something’s happening,” Terry Kakumi said.
Light flashed here, there. A chunk of Pandemonium City broke free, 6 percent or 8 percent of the whole; rotated to use its section of mirror as a shield, and pulled away. Ruby light sputtered at it, belatedly.
“Civil war, maybe. Maybe a lifeboat running away from us. I don’t think they see Captor Fleet as friends.”
“Yeah, Terry. Maybe it’s how Motie cities breed? But whose city? Victoria?” No answer came. Glenda Ruth said, “Likely she’s asleep.” Moties needed their sleep, or at least Mediators did.
Terry said, “We’ve been decelerating for two hours now. Matching velocities. Glenda Ruth, we have to see this-“ Terry’s arm flashed up to block her eyes. A ruby glare filled the cabin. An instant later all screens were black.
“Langston Field,” Terry said. “Ours. Don’t think that place has one. Sorry. Are you okay?”
Freddy said, “Hell, we’re under attack!”
“But by what?” Jennifer asked.
“Good question.’
When nothing further happened, Terry presently cut bricks of basic protocarb for their breakfast. They watched the screen, but it remained dark.
Victoria emerged from the airlock. The Mediator skimmed along one of the big vines, picking red berries, then veered to join them. She asked, “Do you take chocolate for breakfast?”
Glenda Ruth spoke before Terry Kakumi could. “Sure. Freddy? Make it lukewarm, then we can heat ours. Victoria, does your Engineer say it’s safe?”
“Yes.”
Terry couldn’t stand it. “We’re pulling near a large structure. Is it your home?”
A moment’s pause, then Victoria said, “No. Chocolate?”
Freddy didn’t move until Glenda Ruth opened the cocoa and pushed it into his hands. No, he couldn’t read minds, but she made eye contact and thought hard: Yes, Freddy, Victoria’s trying to distract us, yes, she’s hiding something, Freddy love, but we want the lizard-raping chocolate!
Freddy set to work, meticulously measuring powder, shaking it with boiled water, adding the basic protocarb product most crew called milk. He poured it into squeezers and handed one, lukewarm, to the Mediator. The others he set heating in the microwave.
Victoria sipped without waiting. Her eyes widened. “Strange. Good.” She sipped again. “Good.”
“This is the least of what the Empire can offer. More to the point is the meeting of unlike minds. And elbow space.”
Terry’s patience was short. “The city?”
“It’s resources, Terry,” Victoria said. “We will take them.”
“Uh-huh. We want to observe the battle on-site,” Terry Kakumi said. “If-“
“Not a battle, Terry. Pest control. No Master in there, no Mediators, not even Engineers.”
“What are they, then? They’re shooting at us.”
“Watchmakers and . . . I don’t know your word. Only animals. Destructive small animals, dangerous when cornered. Use resources we need.”
“Vermin,” Glenda Ruth said.
“Thank you. Vermin. Yes, they’re shooting, but we can protect ourselves. What is it you want?”
“I want to go in with you, with a camera.” Terry took the bulb Glenda Ruth handed him, but didn’t drink. She sipped the chocolate: a bit too hot, and that was good. Heat would kill what her fingertip had added to the cocoa powder.
“You would see our weapons in use. I know your nature, Terry Kakumi. Warrior-Engineer, as close as your generalist species comes. But able to talk well.”
Freddy suppressed a smile; but Terry showed his teeth. “You wouldn’t use your serious weapons for varmint control, Victoria. Whatever it is that has you so embarrassed, it’s something we have to know. Later would be worse. Nasty surprises breed nasty surprises.”
The screen cleared. Pandemonium glowed before its mirrors. Cerberus’s Watchmakers had pushed a probe through the Field.
Victoria sipped, and thought, and said, “I will ask Ozma.”
Merlin nested in the forepart of the cabin. He was young, with clean white fur you ached to touch; he had never been female. He spent much of his time watching the humans and-if Glenda Ruth was indeed learning some basic captor language, if she’d correctly judged his body language-discussing them with Victoria, the Doctor, the Engineers, the Warriors. Masters asked questions and gave orders. They did not seem inclined to needless conversation, even with other Masters. But they did talk.
Ozma, an older and clearly superior Master to Merlin (parent?), lived somewhere out of sight beyond Cerberus’s big new airlock. Thence Victoria went. An hour later, the spidery Messenger scuttled through and summoned Merlin from his place in the forecabin.
Terry Kakumi slept curled in his couch like an egg in an egg cup. Glenda Ruth watched for dreams to chase themselves across his round features, but really, he was remarkably relaxed for a man who was about to enter mystery.
“He does that better than anyone I know,” Freddy said. “If he knows nothing is going to happen for twenty minutes, he’s out like a light. I guess that’s what they mean by old campaigner.”
“You think it’s a warrior’s skill?”
“It never would have occurred to me before. Sauron, heh?”
The chaotic industrial complex was considerably closer now. Its shape had changed, had closed around the gap left by the one departing section, which was still in view a few kilometers away, under desultory thrust. There was motion on the surface, a doubly silent rustling: windows glinting (not many), small vehicles racing along wire tracks, mirrors rippling as they swung to block a laser spear, a sudden spray of . . . missiles? Tiny ships?
Sporadic ruby beams bathed Cerberus with no effect. Just once the entire mirror-sail complex focused white light with enough energy that the cameras had to be pulled in. Several minutes later the screen was glowing with just a touch of red heat. More minutes later the probe was out again, and Pandemonium showed almost unchanged.
“They ran out of power,” Jennifer surmised. “What do you suppose is in there? Watchmakers and what?”
“Maybe nothing we know about,” Glenda Ruth said. “Watchmakers alone might have built this. You saw Renner’s recording: they ran riot through MacArthur and finally turned it into something alien.”
A tube poked from near the center of the structure, and extended, longer and longer. Like a cannon. “Grab something,” Jennifer said, and reached to tighten Terry’s straps. His eyes opened; with a shrug he freed his arms and folded Jennifer into his chest.
The screen went dark. In the airlock Merlin snapped some command; every Motie form snatched for handholds. Cerberus torqued about them. In the screen was a red glow...orange, yellow...holding.
Victoria popped up beside Merlin, with several other Motie shapes behind her. They all held close to their handholds. A Messenger was towing one of their pressure suits.
“Terry, you may travel with us, unarmed,” Victoria said. “You’ll want hands for your camera anyway. We have restored it to the state you are accustomed to. Don’t try to leave your escorts.”
Terry took the camera from the Engineer. He made adjustments. One of the screens lit with a close view of Victoria, blurred, then sharper. Terry said, “How long?”
“Suit up now”
The Field was orange and cooling.
Terry and Freddy examined the suit, whispering. Hecate’s pressure suits had been confiscated and stowed on the other side of the oval airlock. They were hard suits, rigid pieces shaped to slide over one another, with a fishbowl helmet. Now green-gray sludge in a flaccid plastic bag rode the jet pack on the suit’s back. The helmet’s view had been expanded; the sunblind visor was gone; the helmet itself was no longer quite symmetrical.
“You trust it?”
“No choice, boss. I’m bored.” Terry worked his way into the suit. Before he’d finished, the Engineer and three Watchmakers were already at work on him. Freddy and Jennifer smiled to watch. Glenda Ruth’s stomach was a hard knot.
He could die
Terry was zipped up when the alarms sounded again. He knew that one: Anchor against attack!
When the screen cleared, Pandemonium was very close. The pipe still protruded near the center of the complex, but it pointed askew of Cerberus. More conspicuously, the mirrors were gone...shredded, trailing outward in comet’s configuration.
“It was a double attack on us,” Terry said for his companions’ benefit. “The laser cannon isn’t maneuverable, but you had to take out the mirrors, too, right, Victoria?”
She waved it off. “Battle is no skill of mine.”
Motion swarmed around the shreds of mirror. Glimmers and flashes: they began to re-form. The laser cannon jerked into sudden motion, too slow to catch Cerberus drifting around the city’s edge. Others of Captor Fleet were moving into position.
“Come,” Victoria said. She leapt for the airlock, and Terry, almost as agile, followed.
The Moties could hardly be unaware that they were showing him Cerberus’s Motie sections for the first time, and on record. Terry waved his camera where he would. He was not trying for detail, but rather looking for whatever would bear further investigation.
He didn’t get much of that. He was in a tube that curved like a loop of intestine. Here a dark opening, here a bulge and an armed Warrior clinging to handholds, here a lighted opening and a first glimpse of an older Master. “Studying me. I’d better not stop,” he said. “Victoria isn’t.”
The tube ended in a canister full of Warriors in armored pressure suits.
Victoria waved him in. The Warriors watched him, every one. “Forty armed and armored Warriors, no two weapons alike, no two suits alike, and . . . that one’s pregnant, and that one.” Distinct bulges in the armor, where a human heart would be. Terry let the camera hold on four others: “And I don’t know what to make of those.”
There was a couch just for him. It had an orthopedic look and a plenitude of straps. Terry gave the camera a good look before he strapped in. “Looks like an Engineer and Doctor tried to design this for a human spine. Let’s see . . . Not bad. Not many humans build chairs this good.”
The airlock was sealed and Victoria was gone.
“Three windows, one fore and one aft . . . whichever . . . and this.
“Considerate bastards.” The amidships window was right before his face. One of the odd ones handed Terry a big folded umbrella, nearly weightless. “They’ve taken me for a Pom.”
He was being judged. He chattered because of nerves.
The tradition of Terry Kakumi’s family was never to dwell on tradition. Flexibility was a virtue. Landing on one’s feet was a graceful thing to do. In anarchy and in war and in the Empire’s peace, on Tanith and a score of other worlds, their numbers had grown. But he and they knew their ancestry.
The Kakumis were of Brenda Curtis’s line.
Brenda Curtis had lived nearly four hundred years ago. She’d had six children of her own, and over two hundred had passed through her orphanage farm on their path to adulthood. They tended to intermarry because they understood each other.
Brenda Curtis had been a Sauron superman.
Current tales of the Sauron breeding centers were entirely imaginary. Terry had no idea what his ancestor had escaped from. Only the bald fact of her origin was known, and only to her children...and their fathers? Who could tell, now?
But twenty-four gene-tailored Motie Warriors were about to learn whether a child of Brenda Curtis could take care of himself.
He was not required to fight, Terry reminded himself. He would be judged by whether he survived.
The canister surged. Aft defined itself: the window was wreathed in pale flame. Terry’s chair rotated; the others didn’t.
“They’re pampering me, I think.”
His eye and camera found a broad patch of black against the stars, and a scattering of blunt cylinders accelerating alongside his own. The black edged across the stars. The troopship struck it with a surge and an ominous crunch.
The troopship turned powerfully. Thrust distorted Terry’s voice. “We’ve punched through the mirror. It’s stronger than I expected. Maybe they reinforced it after Cerberus’s attack. I can see a ragged black hole-ooppshit!” Pellets blasted through the cabin.
Terry hadn’t even had a chance to curl around himself. He took a moment to understand that he was alive, unhurt. The rest- “Some Warriors are hit, but they’re ignoring it.” He let the camera watch Warriors place meteor patches in a tearing hurry. “The ship’s decelerating hard. The hailstorm isn’t over. Maybe you can hear the impacts, but the pellets aren’t hitting the life support system anymore. We’re thrusting, too. Something-“ Terry grabbed handholds.
The ship smacked nozzles-first into a wall, with a booming recoil.
Terry’s vision cleared quickly. One of the odd ones had already cut the ship’s hull wide open, and the Warriors were pouring through. Terry searched for a strap release.
The four odd ones moved last.
Terry cut himself free and followed them out. “I’d bet anything that one’s a Warrior-Doctor,” he told his audience. “Those two are officers: better armor, and the widgetry they’re carrying looks like communications, not weapons.” The officers separated quickly. The last Motie was more compact, larger head, the hands more delicate. “That one looks like a cross between Warrior and Engineer. I’ll follow it.”
The starscape was gaudy, but the mirrors were brighter yet. Terry opened his silver umbrella . . . his laser shield.
Pandemonium was brilliantly backlit by the mirrors. The troops were jetting into a madman’s maze. One and another Warrior flashed red, then puffed neon-red gas. Answering fire made actinic flares among the spires and blocks. Warrior troops swarmed from other directions. The ships of Captor Fleet were on all sides of Pandemonium.
Once Terry looked back. He reported, “The troopship’s wrecked and nobody cares. They must be counting on their Warrior-Engineer to build them a way home. They’ll guard him pretty carefully.” But Terry was no longer sure of that. Pandemonium was very close.
They were approaching a windowless wall. The lasers that menaced them were suddenly unable to reach them, except for stragglers . . . such as Terry Kakumi, crouched behind his umbrella. A red dot played across it, and then he, too, was out of the lasers’ view. He moved his umbrella-mirror and saw a bulging crater in the wall, and Captor troops diving through.
Too fast. He activated his backpack jets, then swore luridly for his audience and posterity. “Sorry. I’m getting low thrust. Watchmakers must have fixed my bloody jet pack.” The crater came up, too fast, and he steered to miss the edge. “Must think I don’t mass that much after all.” He clutched his camera to his chest, pointing down into the dark.
A racer’s crew must see what’s going on. A warship is a different matter, and most of Hecate’s window space had disappeared . .. but not all.
So Cerberus’s human crew had three views of the battle. There was Freddy’s telescope, and the window, and Terry’s camera. Mostly they watched the feed from Terry’s camera.
Thirty-four black-armored Warriors had plunged through a black wall, and the camera POV plunged after. Mirrorlight glowed through from behind, illuminating a honeycomb structure too small for humans or normal Moties. Ruby and green flared within the structure. An explosion ripped open a score of rooms. Then tiny forms in silver armor were jetting among the larger Warrior shapes, riding bullet-shaped rockets no larger than themselves, swerving at terrific accelerations, or just blasting through walls and Warriors and into space carrying dead passengers.
Terry’s voice said, “Watchmakers, I think.”
Jennifer said, “Right. It’s like films from MacArthur.”
Terry’s voice ran on. “They’re using projectile weapons, and so are the Warriors: spray guns with tiny bullets.”
Jennifer clutched Freddy’s arm and pointed through a window. Glenda Ruth didn’t turn around. In a moment Freddy touched her shoulder and said, “Somebody’s arrived, some other ship. Real Moties, not vermin. We can see the ripples in the skin of Cerberus. Maybe your brother’s arranged something.”
“Great,” Jennifer said. She started to say something to Glenda Ruth and fell silent.
“Glenda Ruth?” Freddy said. “Are you-“
“Not okay, Freddy. Not. He’s so scared!”
“Traces of the original structure here, I think. Nickel-iron being shaped on site. This may have been an icy asteroid rather than a comet, closer to the sun before all these mirrors altered its orbit-“
“I never saw you like this. How do-“
“Can’t you hear the fear in his voice? He could be killed. That’s why Mediators can’t stand battle. They’re all trying to chew each other up, the Warriors and those little Hell beasts and whatever’s out of sight and-oh God!” The view jerked and skewed, and Terry’s voice stopped. Her hands clamped hard on Freddy’s arm.
Freddy didn’t speak. Glenda Ruth saw that her nails had drawn blood. Her voice rose into a hysterical whine. “They shot him!”
This looked solid, some kind of support strut. Terry had dodged behind it when the bullets sprayed across him. He huddled behind it, reaching. Engineers and Watchmakers had been at work on his suit, and he could only hope-there, the pouch of meteor patches.
He pulled one open. His fingertip traced three tiny holes across his chest carapace, between his right nipple and right shoulder. They’d nearly closed themselves; the hiss had dwindled. The patch covered all three.
But the hiss continued, and he wondered how he would reach his back. The pain and wet were just over his shoulder blade.
The Warriors had gone on. A big Motie head poked around a partition (big was friendly) looked him over (officer?) and withdrew. Another such shape floated nearby, leaking fog through scores of tiny holes, its laser weapon spinning nearby. Maybe the little demons had gone after it deliberately. It was the Warrior-Engineer.
“Doctors probably aren’t intelligent.” Terry had forgotten his audience; he was talking to himself. “Probably. One to treat any Class, but none to treat a human. Who’s going to treat me? Three bullets through my right lung.”
With his fingers on the edge of the second patch, he reached behind him, forced it past the pain, then rubbed his back across the support strut. The hiss stopped.
A cough would have worried him. He’d be coughing blood before this was over. Meanwhile, for his audience: “These were high velocity slugs intended to penetrate armor. Fast but small. No tumble. No stopping power. They’re for Watchmakers or something not much bigger. Infections aren’t any danger out here. Ronald Reagan was shot through the lung with a bigger bullet than these, seventy years old in FDA-era medicine, and he went on to finish two terms as president of the United States of America.” And Reagan hadn’t had Brenda Curtis for an ancestor.
“I’m going for the gun,” Terry said, and leapt. Turning, he snatched the Warrior-Engineer’s laser rifle and impacted his feet against a wall, the camera and gun turned down. The wall shuddered, and his camera caught six silver shapes plunging through.
His gun caught them, too, in a spray of projectiles. There was no answering fire, only a twinkling of edged weapons. His tiny bullets were cutting them up good, but six had become twenty jumping in pursuit as Terry Kakumi’s recoil and suit jets hurled him up through the crater hole. And now they were all bright in mirror light and starlight, and Terry held his camera on the swarm.
A fireball blasted out of Pandemonium, half behind an angular bulge. Terry didn’t bother with it. The camera recorded the shock wave surging through the city.
His breathing was going ragged; he’d have to stop talking soon. But: “They don’t fit the suits. There are slack parts. Six-limbed suits, Watchmaker suits, with one limb tied down, and-“ He coughed and stopped trying. Let the camera speak for him.
They wore borrowed pressure suits with the lower left arm tied down. Half of them had used up their jets and jumped anyway. Animals. Others were fleeing the light; but three turned and made for Terry. He held the camera on them and slashed them with high-V pellets.
Nice. Two merely died, but one silver suit, filleted, puffed its occupant thrashing into space. They weren’t Watchmakers at all.
They were something nastier.
“I never saw …” Freddy peered at the display. “Victoria? What in Hell-“ Victoria was missing. “Glenda Ruth? I’ve seen ‘em before.”
She didn’t want to look. She made herself look and considered what she was seeing. She said, “The Zoo on Mote Prime,” and watched them remembering.
Fourth floor: a Motie city, struck by disaster. Cars overturned and rusted in littered, broken streets. Aircraft had embedded their wreckage in the ruins of fire-scorched buildings. Weeds grew from cracks in the pavement. In the center of the picture was a sloping mound of rubble, and a hundred small black shapes darted and swarmed over it.
Every student at the Institute had studied that scene. The Motie cycle of boom and bust was so dependable that plants and animals had evolved specifically for ruined cities!
One had a pointed, ratlike face with wicked teeth. But it was not a rat. It had one membranous ear, and five limbs. The foremost limb on the right side was not a fifth paw; it was a long and agile arm, tipped with claws like hooked daggers.
“But those were quite different,” Jennifer said. “Look, these are all hands, and longer, leaner. Freddy, can you summon up a copy of What I Did on My Summer Vacation? I think the skulls are bigger, too!”
“They’re changed,” Glenda Ruth said. “Evolution must have moved much faster for them. Shorter generations, bigger litters. Why not? Freddy, I’ve got to get Victoria.”
Terry Kakumi’s voice was much weakened. “I don’t know how to tell Warriors that I need medical help. Freddy, if you’re still hearing me, s-s-s—“ Coughing.
Freddy nodded. He floated toward the airlock, slowly, hands visible for the Warrior on duty. When Freddy reached the lock, the Warrior put his gunpoint in Freddy’s ribs.
Freddy put his head in the lock and yelled, “Victoria! Now! Terry’s been shot! Do you hear me?”
A lopsided face wreathed in white fur confronted him. Freddy wondered if he was seeing Ozma. The Master spoke a word to the Warrior, who pointed its gun elsewhere. The Master turned full away and hiss-whistled.
Victoria came. Freddy explained rapidly; Victoria translated; the Master went away; so did Victoria. The Warrior reached, turned Freddy around, and pushed him back to the control center.
On-screen, a pair of Warriors had retrieved Terry. Freddy could glimpse them at the screen’s edge, towing him. Voiceless, Terry pointed the camera to pick up: A snowstorm of dead war rats, big as greyhounds and small as puppies, all armed with edged weapons, some armed with guns.
A factory, empty, scaled down. That looked to be a distillery; that, a smelter. Even in the asteroid mines of most systems, humans would align their furniture. Here boilerplate-bulky machines pointed off at all angles, leaving almost no waste space.
A sudden firefight receded as Terry’s escorts made for safety. A Warrior’s grenade opened a wall to space. War rats blew past them toward the stars. Warriors picked off the few in stolen suits.
Victoria was back. “Ozma has told the Chief, but-“ She saw the screen. “That’s better. Your friend was inside too many walls. Ozma has also summoned a hybrid who might help your friend, an interbreeding of Doctor and Master. We only have one.”
Freddy nodded and said appropriate things. Glenda Ruth only watched. The camera didn’t seem to be pointing at anything interesting anymore.
And there’re a
hun-dred-mil-lion-oth-ers, like
all of you successfully if
delicately gelded (or spaded)
gentlemen (and ladies)
e. e. cummings
When the Doctor-Master arrived, Freddy had anticipated him. He had library medical tapes already running. The long-fingered almost-Master watched for a few minutes, looked the three humans over, decided Freddy was the male, peeled him, and began comparing him to what he was seeing on the screen. The Anglic commentary ran at low volume while Victoria spoke a running translation into the fleshy trumpet of the Doctor’s ear. She was frequently baffled.
The Doctor was a young male, Victoria told them. “Doctor Doolittle,” Glenda Ruth named him, and saw Jennifer smile. Freddy’s face remained a rictus of discomfort.
Glenda Ruth wondered why Captor Fleet had chosen to feed such a peculiarity when they were so obviously short of resources. As if they had known aliens were coming . . . known ten years ago. Where the hell was Terry?
Terry was alive, technically, when they brought him in nearly two hours later. A misshapen Warrior was pumping his rib cage, breathing for him, Glenda Ruth looked at him and gave up hope.
Doctor Doolittle spoke rapidly.
The Warrior slashed the front of Terry’s suit and pulled him out. A pair of Watchmakers pulled a black pressure balloon open and fished out transparent tubes and a canister. The little Doctor-Master wrapped itself around Terry’s head and shoulders, planted his ear on Terry’s torso, and listened. Then it pulled his head far back and fed the tube into his nose.
Terry thrashed weakly. Red flowed down the tube. The Motie watched for a few minutes, then spoke. The Warrior had gone back to breathing for Terry, flexing his chest, on and on, without fatigue. The Watchmakers fished out a squeezebulb of clear fluid.
Glenda Ruth stopped watching. She couldn’t stand it.
Freddy pulled his shorts on and left it at that; the Motie Doctor might need to compare again. He caught her eye as she turned away, and she knew another moment of dread.
“Glenda Ruth-“
She turned away as the strange doctor spoke softly to the Warriors.
Captor Fleet was at work beyond Cerberus’s windows. From all they could see, the War Rats and Watchmakers were no longer to be feared. Larger ships had moved in. Altered troopships and tinier ships yet moved in a cloud around Pandemonium. An Engineer with a crew of Watchmakers worked on one of the damaged troopships. Large Moties from time to time came out of the ruins with-things. Broken machinery. Tankage. Plastic bags.
Jennifer said, “Remember the battle? Just before we were captured? Just lasers, no projectiles. In Pandemonium the Warriors used bullets, but only inside walls. But the rats and brownies were shooting everywhere.”
“Your point?”
“Well, Victoria keeps calling them animals. She especially likes the word vermin. Maybe because they don’t care how much stuff they throw away, even if it can be recycled. That’s what all those little ships are doing, chasing down stuff that got loose during the fight.”
Glenda Ruth nodded. “Yeah. How’s Terry?”
“Breathing on his own. I want a human doctor.”
“Hang in there. Terry’s tough.”
Silence.
“I couldn’t watch.”
“I noticed,” Jennifer said.
“You think he’s not feeling anything, and you’re almost right, he won’t remember how bad it is. But his body, his nerves, he’s hurt, Jennifer, and I can feel it. Oh, hell, don’t you leave me, too!”
“Too?”
“Freddy saw me! He saw me turning away from Terry. Squeamish. I’m going to lose him, Jennifer!”
“Not if he watches you save our asses. But you’re juggling priceless eggs in variable gravity, girl.”
Glenda Ruth only nodded. She couldn’t answer that at least they were right on schedule.
“I hope you’re not overly tired, sir,” Chris Blaine said.
“Not yet, not in this gravity,” Bury said. He looked across the room to Omar, who once again held Ali Baba. “Against all reason I find myself attracted to the pu-to Ali Baba. An unexpected pleasure. But I fear we are away from the comforts of Sinbad to no great purpose. Except, of course, to reassure our hosts.” It was an awkward situation, made more so because no one wanted to talk about it. It was the one thing East India and Medina Traders agreed to completely: neither would allow the other to talk to Horace Bury alone. “They cling to me as to a talisman,” Bury said.
“Or a credit card,” Blaine said, and Bury glared.
The outer door opened and a thin, spidery shape entered. The Motie went to Omar and waited patiently as Omar and Eudoxus gathered around it, then chattered excitedly.
“Something important,” Blaine said. He thumbed the microphone of his communicator. “Captain, an East India messenger just came in. Whatever it’s saying has got both the Mediators listening hard.”
“Could it be about Hecate?” Renner’s voice asked.
“I don’t-“
“Stand by one,” Renner said.
“What?” Joyce demanded. “What’s happening?” She edged closer to the Moties, pickup camera whirring softly.
“Rawlins has spotted a fleet,” Renner said. “A big one, coming from in-system. Hyperbolic orbit, accelerating like they’ve got lots of power.”
“Warships,” Blaine said.
“Sure sounds like it,” Renner said. “Don’t know whose, but they’re heading this way.”
“Excellency, we have news,” Omar said.
“Thank you.”
“Excellency, the humans are all safe. One, the ship’s engineer, was injured in a way that I do not quite understand, but I am assured it was through no fault of the Crimean Tartars, who have been persuaded of the value of their guests. One of my apprentices, very young and inexperienced but fluent in Anglic, has been accepted by the Tartars and will presently be allowed to speak with the humans.” Omar beamed. “He will, of course, be pleased to invite a representative of our Medina Allies, as soon as one arrives.”
“This is splendid news,” Bury said. “We are in your debt. I wonder if we might prevail upon Medina’s hospitality for one more favor.”
“You have but to ask, presuming it is possible,” Eudoxus said.
“A message,” Bury said. “It would be well for all concerned if Lord Blaine were informed that his offspring are safe.”
Eudoxus and Omar looked at each other. Ali Baba’s attention remained fixed on Bury. “An interesting notion,” Eudoxus said. “But one that presents considerable technical difficulties. Neither East India nor Medina controls Crazy Eddie’s Sister. Nor do the Crimean Tartars. The Khanate now holds that point and even now gathers more warships to consolidate their hold. Their own, and others. We fear they have created a formidable alliance, one which may even now be growing.”
“A combined action of Medina and East India might suffice to escort one ship to the Sister,” Omar said. “But as East India has more ships in that area, our losses would be the greater. We would require compensation.”
“I had in mind something simpler,” Bury said. “Send a message through the Crazy Eddie point to Murcheson’s Eye. Take one of your flimsy token ships. Wrap a transmitter in a thick layer of suitably ablative material with a mechanical device to turn it on once through. Let it broadcast its location. Message cubes inside should survive long enough to be retrieved.”
“Simple mechanical device,” Omar said.
“Jump shock is an experience previously described to us, which I have now twice experienced,” Eudoxus said. “It is-formidable. Excellency, I need hardly point out that the contents of a message to your blockade battle fleet will be of great interest to all of us. Will you summon that fleet here?”
“I think not,” Bury said. “But surely it would be to our advantage to have those not inconsiderable resources at our disposal?” He looked significantly at the Motie Warriors. “And of course we will continue to enjoy your gracious hospitality as we negotiate.”
Eudoxus and Omar exchanged looks, then Eudoxus began to speak, slowly and carefully, in the glottal language the Moties had been using to speak to their Masters. Both Masters replied, each to a Mediator, never to each other. The messenger was sent out. Two came back; they delivered messages to each of the Mediators. The Masters spoke quickly and curtly, the Mediators at greater length. The discussion continued for a long time as Joyce’s pickup whirred
Bury waited with a look of serene calm. Ali Baba aped his look, a study of serious concentration. Blaine reported developments to Sinbad and Renner.
Finally Eudoxus spoke. “It seems you are correct, Excellency. We may have need of your fleet. We count five fleets probably converging on us. One is from Byzantium. We have reports that the Masters of the Mote Beta moons, the group we have called the Persian Empire, are gathering a fleet. The Khanate has summoned allies to their aid in holding the Sister. There comes another large group from sunward.”
“In other words, everyone who has warships is becoming involved,” Joyce Trujillo said.
“Just so,” Omar said. “And thus our Masters are agreed. The partnership between Medina and East India shall be renewed. When that is accomplished, it would be well to summon whatever resources your Empire can bring.”
“Before they kill us all,” Joyce said.
Omar bowed. “Just so.”
Engineers had erected a screen around the area where Dr. Doolittle and his aides worked on Terry. Freddy was back there for ten hours, while Jennifer and Glenda Ruth waited alone. Finally he came out.
“I’ll have to go back presently,” he said. “They want my opinions. Mostly I don’t know, but I can work the data retrieval system for Dr. Doolittle. It’s mostly in charts. Some of it I have to read to him, with gestures. He learns fast, numbers he understands already. Got any coffee?”
Jennifer handed him a bulb. “I should heat that.”
“Heat the next one. I’ll drink this.”
All right.” Jennifer put a bulb in the microwave and started it.
“Freddy, I haven’t heard Victoria back there?”
“She’s been gone for hours. One of the others, I think the Engineer that’s been . . . improving Hecate, came and got her, and that was the last I saw of her. Sometimes I talk into a mike and Dr. Doolittle listens to what has to be a translation, but I don’t know who’s on the other end.” Freddy sipped the lukewarm coffee. “Good stuff. Thanks.”
“When can I see him?” Jennifer’s cry was more nearly a wail.
Freddy looked to Glenda Ruth.
Glenda Ruth dropped her pensive look and shuddered. “I think you should wait to be asked. Something odd is happening.”
“I’m scared,” Jennifer said. “We talked about-he grew up on Tanith, you know. Freddy, he will be all right!”
“If the Moties can manage it, he will be,” Freddy said. “They’re going all out. They have some instrument the size of a spatball racket that puts a three-D image of Terry’s insides on our tri-vee screen. They’ve got him stabilized. Blood pressure has been the same for hours now.”
It had not been instantly obvious: the looming bulk of the Mosque had been a block of water ice permeated by tunnels when Sinbad docked. But Engineers had been at work, carving rooms out of the ice, insulating, decorating. The lounge, located just outside Sinbad’s airlock, had been growing during the negotiations. Now there was a small kitchen, a wardrobe, and a half-completed minigym besides the conversation pit with Motie and human chairs and couches. Chris feared it would be the size of Serpens City before they accomplished anything.
Eudoxus spoke long and earnestly to the Master called Admiral Mustapha Pasha. From time to time Omar spoke to the East India Master in the guttural language Chris Blaine had learned to recognize as the Motie trade koine. Ali Baba moved from Bury to Omar and back, but his attention was always on Bury.
Messengers went to and fro like big-headed, lopsided spider monkeys, beautiful only in their agility. Mediators and Masters took frequent rest periods and returned always together, sometimes with Motie pups. The Mediators were talking now, briskly, as if it hadn’t all been talked to death long since.
Chris watched and listened and presently offered to speak for Joyce’s pickup camera. Joyce tried to find an excuse to refuse and gave up almost instantly. “Thank you, Lieutenant Blaine,” she said most courteously, and posed him in a corner of the new lounge.
So: scholar’s pose, no sexual signals, and give her his best. “A pidgin is needed to bridge two languages because shadings and nuances and background assumptions don’t work. You need it whenever nuances don’t work. But Motie language is inflections and body language and even scent, and any of that might have to be dropped for a telephone, or pressure suits, or video with a bad connection. The weird thing is just how easily these Moties use what they can and drop everything else. It isn’t just the flexibility of the trade language. They generally have to create a trade language on the spot.” Chris saw goblin ears focused on him and wondered how much they would understand. How much he understood.
“We’re watching a parallel here. Ali Baba, not yet at the age of reason, clearly understands the concept called Fyunch(click) in the Mote Prime language. We’re watching him learn both Anglic and the new pidgin simultaneously, and in hours he has learned what a bright human child might pick up in days or weeks. Biological specialization at work. And of course we’ve seen that in the other specialties.
“We’re learning a lot about Moties, and that’s important.”
“Can you say more about that, Lieutenant?” Joyce asked. Her tone was richly professional.
“We’ve no choice, this time,” Chris said. “Blockades just aren’t going to work. We’ll have to learn to get along with the Moties-“
“One way or another,” Joyce said, but her own pickup mike wasn’t on. “Lieutenant-“ She stopped.
Here came the paired messengers again. Chris watched them scamper along the chamber’s multicolored rock, breaking stride and zigging into channels and depressions. He’d watched them several times, and this time he was sure: their fur changed color to match the rock. Piloerection was doing that, exposing different layers, but the effect hid them like chameleons. They reached their respective Masters, clung to their fur, and whispered briefly.
The Masters had one final exchange with their Mediators, and all four Mediators came to the human group.
“Excellency,” Omar said. “I am pleased to inform you that Medina and East India are agreed, in principle and in all essential details.” He bowed; his feet left the rock and returned when he straightened.
“This is pleasing,” Bury said.
Eudoxus bowed, too. Nobody laughed. “We have agreed on our status and domains, but more important is that we have agreed about you. We tell you nothing new when we say our choices are limited, and our greatest asset is your friendship.”
Bury nodded. “More pleasing still. We are honored to be your friends.”
“Thank you,” Omar said. “We perceive that even if we watch you compose the message you will send to your colleagues in the Crazy Eddie Squadron, we must still trust you to tell us its meaning. Before you send this message you will naturally wish to speak with crew aboard your ship, and it is pointless to detain you here. When your message is complete, East India will deliver it. A suitable ship is being readied.”
This time Bury’s smile was warm and genuine. “Our thanks. Your hospitality has been admirable, but perhaps my friends would be more comfortable aboard our own ship.”
“There is one matter,” Omar said. “My colleague at the Crimean Tartar fleet reports his own observation that all the humans aboard Hecate are alive, and only the engineer-warrior has been injured; but for reasons that the Crimean Tartar Mediator will neither explain nor discuss, he has not been permitted to speak with them. We have been promised that this will change soon.”
Bury acknowledged with a nod.
Damned odd, Chris thought. Something has changed, something happened that the Tartars don’t want us to know. What? But Eudoxus and Omar knew that as well as he did.
“Do you wish to return to your ship now?” Eudoxus asked.
Bury nodded gravely. “It would be convenient.”
“Medina and East India have come to another agreement, Excellency,” Omar said. “But one which requires your consent. With your permission, Au Baba will become your companion. An apprentice. Of course he will spend only part of his time with you, as he must learn our languages and customs as well.”
Bury bowed slightly. “I am flattered. I find him an agreeable companion. However, you will understand, there will be times when I must be alone with my friends.”
“Of course, Excellency.”
“Meanwhile, this is satisfactory. We go now to draft our messages. We will, of course, read and explain to you any message we compose.”
“Thank you. We will provide you with an escort,” Eudoxus said. “Joyce, your viewers may be interested in this base. If you would care to see more of it, I am available to conduct you on a tour. We’ll have you back on Sinbad in, say, two hours?”
“Perhaps another time,” Chris Blaine said. What did they have in mind? Nuances here, subtle, ominous.
Eudoxus spread her hands slightly. “There may be no other time when we are both free, but of course it will be as you wish.”
“No, I want to go,” Joyce said. “You can tell me about the message later when we finish the interview. Eudoxus, I’d love to see the rest of your base.”
“Very good. Join us when you can, Joyce,” Bury said affably.
Chris as a Navy officer knew that he didn’t have Bury’s authority. If Bury saw no way to stop her or them, how could Chris? He’d have to use persuasion- Outmaneuvered. Joyce was gone, Eudoxus leading and a Warrior behind. Bury and Omar followed at a leisurely pace, chatting, Bury carrying Ali Baba. They left Chris and Cynthia to bring up the rear.
After fifteen hours in the hidden depths of Cerberus, Victoria arrowed through the airlock with the agility of a Messenger. Glenda Ruth was jolted.
“Victoria? Victoria, what are th-“
“We have to talk. Ambassadors are arriving.”
“Ambassadors from where?”
“Second, from the kingdom that allies with your ships called Sinbad and Atropos, henceforth Medina Trading Company.”
Jennifer smiled acknowledgment. “Medina-“
“Later,” Victoria said. “The Medina ship will rendezvous here; Vermin City makes a convenient target. But the first is already aboard. He speaks for former allies of Medina, henceforth East India Trading Company. The two are now involved in a dominance dance. We must settle certain matters before he may see you. We’ve been verbal-dancing for some days.”
Glenda Ruth looked at the screen that hid Terry and Doctor Doolittle. “Can we summon a human doctor?”
“He is in no more danger than you are,” Victoria said. “How is it that one of our Engineers has turned male without first giving birth?”
“Oops,” Jennifer said.
“And so has one of our Warriors,” Victoria said, “and although Watchmakers are difficult to keep track of-“
“How do you feel?”
“We must settle this now. Have you brought alien death among us? What did you say, Glenda Ruth?”
“How do you feel, Victoria?”
The Mediator tasted the question, as if she found the flavor novel and fascinating. “I feel good. Motivated. The air is sweet, our food seems up to specs, my appetite-“ Victoria suddenly reached between her legs. “Talk fast,” she said. “For your lives.”
“I have a recording to play for you.”
BLAINE INSTITUTE REPORTS, Volume 26, Number 5, Imperial Library number ACX-7743DL-2359 10:26:5
Approaches to Stability of the Mote Civilization
Ishikara, Mary Anne, Dashievko, Ahmed, Grodnik, Vladimir Lambert, George G.: Rikorsky, W. L., and Talbot, Fletcher E,
“The C-L Symbiote,”
Research reported in this document was funded by grants from the Imperial Ministry of Defense, the Imperial Select Commission for Governing Relations with Aliens, and the Blaine Foundation.
Summary
The Blaine Symbiote or C-L (Contraceptive-Longevity) worm is bioengineered from a Motie benign parasitic organism similar to platyhelminths. The resulting C-L organism is a symbiote that lives in the Motie body and produces the same hormone that the male testes produce.
The original symbiotes were universally present in the intestinal tracts of all Moties studied. The first forms were detected in the Motie Engineer taken aboard MacArthur, but none of those specimens survived. The current C-L syrnbmote has been bred from a strain taken from the Motie known as Ivan. It is known to survive in Mediator castes, and there is no reason to suppose it will not thrive in all Motie castes,
In all Motie castes so far examined there has been one testis, and the documents brought by the Motie ambassadors, and the Moties themselves, do not contradict this, This testis normally withers, Hapgood et. al (I) have speculated that this withering is triggered in part by pheromones given of f by a pregnant female, but it is known Ivanov and Spector. (2)) that the process is more complex than that.
Upon withering of the single testis, the Motie turns female, Pregnancy must follow soon after or the Motie sickens and dies, with symptoms not unlike vitamin deficiency. See Renner, K. (3), Fowler, S. (4), and Elaine and Blaine (5), as well as The Report of the MacArthur Expedition (6), for details. The process of giving birth excites cells in the birth canal, and more male testes form,
The C-L symbiote normally sites itself anywhere in the body cavity and does not wither. Present data indicate that several C-Ls have no more effect than one, It is believed that this is due to excretion of surplus hormone via Plumbing-Six, tentatively the kidney.
We have observed no signs that C-L will breed in a host Motie, undoubtedly due to inhibition by the hormone itself. Consequently C-L must be bred externally in an environment that provides sufficient fluid around them to flush the hormone.
Video Report (Reuters)
Blaine Institute Announces New Developments in Bioengineering
(Film clip: Lord and Lady Elaine, the Hon. Glenda Ruth Blaine, students at the Blaine Institute, and His Excellency the Ambassador from Mote Prime, announcing publication of results of bioengineering development.)
“Of course that record could have been made at any time,” Victoria said.
“It has me in it.”
“Or a very good double, Glenda Ruth. It would take much forethought to plan far in advance to deceive us into believing that a Mediator can survive this long-but your Empire has both means and motive.”
“I’m in the pictures, too,” Jennifer said.
“Yes. You would require two doubles and two surgical alterations of adults. Is this beyond your capability?”
Freddy’s eyes wandered from the screen to Glenda Ruth to the screen, and he shook his head.
Victoria, watching him carefully, said, “Jock’s survival surprised you, Freddy, when you learned of it from Jennifer and Glenda Ruth. With her training, could Glenda Ruth deceive you? And Jennifer?”
“It’s not that. Think, Victoria. If that’s not Jennifer and Glenda Ruth, then it’s two actors just out of surgery who have to fool Motie Mediators, and know they’ve done it!”
Good, Freddy! “This game gives us no profit,” Glenda Ruth said. “Victoria, you already feel better than you have in years! And your Engineer, and your Warrior, are they sick?”
“Is this reversible in fertile castes?” Victoria demanded.
“Probably. With difficulty, but very probably. Is the native parasite endemic to space civilizations?”
“If so, I do not know of it. It is no skill of mine. Would I be infected with a parasite and not know?”
“Why not? People often are,” Freddy said.
“Even those who live in isolation? I see you believe so.” The Motie paused, and whatever expressions Glenda Ruth had been able to read were replaced by a different mask. “I must think on this.”
“Wait. There.” She could have remained silent- Too late. Victoria turned. “What?”
“I don’t have any better argument than that.” Glenda Ruth pointed. “On the screen, Victoria.”
The busy spacecraft of Captor Fleet had torn away a tremendous strip of the city’s skin. Pandemonium lay exposed, a hive of cells still sparking with defenses. Corpses floated away in a pestilential cloud of black dots. The ships pulled a square kilometer of transparent skin over the wound and moved inside to work. Nothing was to be lost.
“That’s your past, a million years or more of your past. Breeding yourselves into a starving cannibal horde, then tearing your numbers down in blood. Vermin City. That’s your future, forever, without us.” Glenda Ruth waved at the screens. “It’s Vermin City or the Crazy Eddie Worm.”
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac
“Chris, it’s time,” Kevin Renner said. “Tell me about you and Joyce.”
Blaine looked from Renner to Horace Bury. No help there. Sinbad’s lounge had grown larger yet; it seemed very large, and very empty.
“All right, Captain, we were sleeping together, so to speak, and then we weren’t. I’m more worried about what the Moties might get out of her.”
“So am I. Try again.”
Chris Blaine saw no point in pretending to misunderstand. “I got to know her. I could see what she was looking for in me, in a man, and when I got some free time, I, hell. I let her see it. But when we reached MGC-R-31 and Motie ships came spitting out...How to put this?”
“She wanted you to keep your promises.”
Chris gaped. “Well, but I never-“
The Captain said, “What she wants from a man is knowledge and power. That was what you let her see. But when Moties appeared, she wanted in on the action. You couldn’t give her that. You couldn’t even let her keep interrupting you while you were on duty. What else couldn’t you give her?”
“Aw, hell. Captain, she wanted to know what my sister’s bringing. I don’t know! Not certainly, I only know what Dad and Mom, what the Institute, wanted.”
“Which is enough,” Renner said.
“Well, no . . . well. That was the trouble. I couldn’t tell her as much as I do know because the Mediators would read her. They’d be doing that now if she knew anything. Now she won’t talk to me at all.”
“Chris, you did make promises. You used body language and nuances and all the things Jock and Charlie taught you. You’ve got to be more careful of how you use people.”
Chris’s ears burned.
“If you told her anything, if she learned anything that the Moties shouldn’t know, tell me now.”
“Captain, she heard you talking about Crazy Eddie’s worm. She was sure I must know all about it. There was nothing I could do to tell her different.”
“She’s a reporter. She must have met every brand of liar there is.”
“Yeah. I thought it must be Mom’s C-L worm. I didn’t tell her that. Now she thinks I’m dirt. Yes, she’s right, I lied to her. I had to.”
Captain Renner studied him and presently sighed. “All right, Lieutenant. Now what the hell else is going on? What’s your reading of this situation with the Crimean Tartars?”
“I think Omar is as confused as we are,” Blaine said. “Glenda Ruth must have done something to shake them up.”
“We may well be able to guess what it is,” Bury said. “Which could leave her in some danger.”
“Whether or not the worm works as advertised,” Chris said.
“Yeah, I’d thought of that,” Renner said. “But so far-”
“So far no harm has come to them,” Bury said. “And time is very much on our side. The Empire, for all its divisions, remains a nearly unified force. We have no need to negotiate alliances to gain great strength. With the Moties it is not so.”
“Horace, what will happen to the Moties?” Renner demanded. “What should happen to them?”
“I truly do not know.”
“You’ll pardon me, but you don’t seem quite the fanatic you used to be.”
“Kevin, how could I be? I see here a tragedy, a people not unlike my own, with few resources, divided against themselves.”
“Finding the whole place shot through with Bury Mediators might have changed your perspective?”
“Don’t miss the implication,” Chris said. “They can swallow His Excellency’s views and not choke. That tells us a lot about them.”
“Yeah, but does it tell us enough? Horace, I can’t believe you’ve changed that much.”
“I bow to Allah’s will. Kevin, the Empire barely had the resources to guard one gate, and that one through a sun. Shall it now have two blockade fleets, one to hold a volume of normal space? Perhaps, but at great cost, and for how long? Kevin, the Moties are no less a threat than ever, but our ability to contain them is not adequate to the task.”
“So now what?”
Bury looked through the Mosque’s picture window and made a face. Somewhere on the pale face of Base Six was Joyce Mei-Ling Trujillo, unreachable.
He said, “One day’s work at a time. We are to compose a message, which the Moties will attempt to send for us. What shall we say?”
“Think we’re secure here?” Renner asked
Bury shrugged. “All of Nabil’s skills were unable to detect listening devices. I do not believe the Moties can be so confident that they could plant a device with the certainty that we would not find it. If we found one, it would very much affect our relationship. Let us act as if there are no Moties listening, but not act as if we were certain of it.”
“On that score, what happens when Ali Baba’s with us?” Renner demanded.
“Then we are faithful allies of East India,” Bury said. “Mediators serve their own Masters.”
Renner nodded. “Blaine. Message.”
“A quick description of the situation, with all of the Alderson geometry data we have,” Blaine said. “Including all that data from the Alexandria Library. That will make it a lot easier to get the Fleet in here. Of course there’s not much chance it will happen. Admiral the Honorable Sir Harry Weigle. Sent out after Joyce Trujillo’s first articles. Assigned to clean up the corruption, put some discipline back in the Crazy Eddie Squadron. He’s doing a good job at that, but he’s not big on disobeying orders.”
“And his orders are to maintain the blockade,” Renner said.
“Just so.”
“What can we do to convince him?”
Blaine thought for a moment. “He’d have to be convinced that he had a higher duty than carrying out his orders.”
“Could you persuade him?”
Chris thought that one over. “Possibly. I can’t reach him. You can. So let’s look at what he knows. The Alderson point back to New Cal has moved. So has the Jump to the Mote, and he’ll know that, but he probably hasn’t found it. It’s dancing around down there inside a red giant star.”
“MacArthur found it easily enough thirty years ago,” Bury reminded them.
“Different geometry. No jittery new star to distort the path,” Renner said. “Not that bloody easily, either. Trust me.”
Blaine nodded. “MacArthur and Lenin were specially equipped and had some of the Empire’s best scientists aboard, along with a top navigator. Even then it took them a while to find the old one. So. We’re going to help him find the new Crazy Eddie point. That will start him off thinking right. We give him information that helps him in his mission.”
Renner’s nod prompted Blaine to continue: “The tricky thing is to be sure we don’t ask him to violate orders. Such as letting anything get out of the star and through to New Cal.”
“So if we ask him to listen before he shoots.”
“He might do that,” Blaine said. “It’s worth a try.”
Eudoxus led her down and slantwise from the lounge. Vacuum gear waited in an alcove a hundred meters below the Mosque. Joyce was taken aback. This hadn’t come from Sinbad!
Eudoxus was watching. That irritating smile . . . hah. Joyce recorded, “The Motie smile is rigid. It’s always there. You don’t see it on a Mediator unless she’s not sending any other signal.”
Joyce donned a skintight pressure suit (it felt funny, comfortable though), fishbowl helmet, thermal oversuit (lighter than she’d expected) and mirror cloak. They looked archaic: they almost matched Empire Navy specs of thirty years ago, altered to alien tastes.
“Comfortable?”
“Yes,” she told Eudoxus. She was relieved. She’d thought they would have to return to the Mosque. The helmet would reveal her face for the pickup camera.
Two of the little Messengers joined them. The party returned to the tunnel as five puffy silver dolls. They passed through three doors of a massive airlock and out onto an icy surface.
Frozen hydrogen, she remembered: fluffy, loosely packed, not visibly different from water ice. Maybe crusted in water ice. How could you tell? She didn’t feel the cold.
“These are handholds, all but the green and red,” Eudoxus said. “Don’t lose your grip, Joyce. The Base is under acceleration.”
Joyce gripped a yellow-and-orange line. “Green and red?”
“Green is superconductor cables. Red is fuel.” Eudoxus was already moving, jumping along the surface, the cable sliding through her hands. “And the big translucent tubes are for transport.”
The gray ice curved sharply. The top of a dome showed beyond the curve. In another direction, the Mosque cradled Sinbad. A bright red spark looked over its shoulder: the Eye. In another, a violet horizon-glow that had to be the fusion motors pushing Inner Base Six.
Fabulous pictures! The kind of thing careers are founded on! She chuckled to herself. Chris Blaine’s frantic look! As if he’d told me anything to begin with. As if the Moties could read my mind or my face. What could Eudoxus see, anyway? I’m a big silver pillow.
But if Joyce could see the Motie smile . . . less irritating, now that she understood it . . . then Eudoxus could see her face, too.
Eudoxus was taking them away from the motors: forward. Joyce followed. The Warrior followed her, and the Messengers.
The cable split; they followed yellow. It led over a small dome. Moties looked up at Joyce through a glass bull’s-eye and a forest of dark green moss: three Whites, a Warrior, a Messenger, some Watchmakers.
Eudoxus asked, “Joyce, what’s with Horace Bury?”
“What do you mean?’
“Thirty years ago, he thought the Mote system was the way to get rich. He couldn’t see enough of anything. Now he seems much calmer, less ambitious, more like a Keeper. But-“
Joyce was amused. “He was already older than a man can get without serious medical help. It’s thirty years later.”
“There’s more. He flinches when a Warrior comes near. All right, so do you, I can understand that.” Eudoxus had lost all trace of accent, Joyce realized suddenly. “But he flinches from Watchmakers. Even from the newborn, until he knows they are not Watchmakers.”
“They blindside him. His eyes can’t be all that-“
“No, Joyce, it’s not their size. He likes the little Mediator pups, once he knew what they are.”
Bury’s attitude toward Moties was no secret within the Empire. Rather the opposite. “He has always been afraid of you,” Joyce said. “Terrified, even. Since he returned from the first Mote expedition. But that’s changing. I can see it.”
“Why?”
Joyce thought it over. Bury’s attitude toward Moties was no secret, but the cause of MacArthur’s death was a Navy secret; secret from the Moties, by order of the Privy Council. It was a good question, though. What was changing Horace Bury? Greed, probably. “There are still vast fortunes to be made. Power and influence, for Bury and his relatives.”
Three dissimilar spacecraft nursed from red cables that dipped into the ice. Each ship was built as solidly as a safe. A transparent tube ringed the ships; canisters and Moties of several sizes flew along inside it.
Eudoxus didn’t try to stop Joyce from circling the ships with her pickup camera running. Others-Chris, the Captain, Dr. Buckman-would understand more than she did. She pointed her pickup along the tube, watching the Moties fly. Warriors, four Engineers, a Messenger.
Eudoxus said, “We don’t have to move this slowly, Joyce. The tube is faster and you would still have a view.”
No accent, but an irritating richness, an overemphasis on consonants- My voice! Eudoxus spoke with Joyce Trujillo’s voice, exactly as she sounded on video. “No, this is fine,” she said. “I’m getting great pictures.”
The Mediator led off. Aft, the glow of jets had faded to black sky.
Eudoxus stopped. Joyce and the Warrior caught up; Eudoxus spoke briefly to the Warrior. Then her upper right arm pointed ahead and up. “There, Joyce, what do you see in the sky?”
Joyce followed the creature’s long upper-right arm. “Just stars.”
“The Warrior says he’s spotted it, the locus of your friends.”
“Do Warriors have good eyes?”
“Yes.”
Joyce tapped at the pickup, instructing it to find and fix on the brightest spot in its field, narrow the field, zoom in. She raised it by its sleeve, aligned along Eudoxus’s arm, and set it going.
The camera wriggled in its sleeve, gyros whirring. A wide field of stars showed on the monitor screen. There: crumpled tinsel reflecting dim sunlight, just bigger than a point. Joyce set the camera zooming. Structure began to show, crumpled mirrors, a beehive torn open, violet points that might be fusion torches or spacecraft.
“Do you have it? It’s a nest of war rats and Watchmakers. It’s being harvested by the Crimean Tartars.”
“Now follow my finger down to the horizon. A scattering of blue points?”
Joyce shook her head. Again she worked with the pickup.
“I don’t see it either, but Warriors can. That’s a war fleet bearing down on the nest.”
“Got it.” It was as Eudoxus had said, a scattering of blue points and no more.
“Mostly Khanate ships. In four hours they will arrive at the rat nest, but in twenty minutes the Tartars will be running. It’s being negotiated now. They’ll rendezvous with Base Six as we pass, and they have your friends.”
“Great! I should tell the Captain.”
“We will do that,” Eudoxus said.
“Good.” Chris should have been here, she thought with satisfaction. A sudden thought. “Have the Tartars become your allies?”
And thus ours.
“Perhaps. For the moment they are in mortal danger, and we offer them refuge. For the future-what is the future, Joyce? The question is not what place the Tartars have with Medina and East India, it is what place have Moties in the universe.”
“I can’t answer that.”
“No, but you must have thought about it.”
“Sure. A lot of people have.” Interest in Moties flared and died and flared again through the Empire, and the latest news would cause the biggest flare of all. What to do about Moties would be the topic of discussion everywhere. The Humanity League. The Imperial Senate. The Navy League. The Imperial Traders Association. The editorial board of her own news syndicate. Little old ladies at tea parties.
She was beginning to notice the cold . . . or was it the dark? Her body wasn’t cold, she was sweating with the exercise, but the black sky and gray ice pulled at her mind. They’d left the domes and ships behind.
Eudoxus bounced alongside her, talking, with the Warrior at the lead. “We’ve taken a great gamble, you know.”
“Yes.”
‘If we could only understand one thing, we would feel far less at risk. Your superiors seem to expect . . . what shall we call our gathering of alliances? . . . expect the Medina Consortium to remain stable, ultimately to speak for all of Mote system. How can they expect that?”
“I don’t know.” The Motie was too distant: Joyce couldn’t see her face. She wouldn’t be able to see Joyce’s either. But all discussions of Moties came down to the same thing: there was no central Motie government, and it didn’t look as if there ever could be. How could there be stable relations with a caldron of Motie families? Even the real Genghis Khan hadn’t been able to form a stable empire of Mongols...
They’d reached a ring of domes wreathed in cables of all sizes and colors, with a great ship rising out of the center. In the minuscule gravity Joyce bounded to the crest of a dome and caught up a handhold line. Joyce considered herself to be hard and fit, but this was hard work . . . and the Warrior was alongside her in an instant, and here was Eudoxus, too. Didn’t Moties get tired faster than humans?
Eudoxus spoke to the Warrior, who said little, and then switched to Anglic. “A Master’s ship is bigger, to house an entourage, and is built for intelligence and communications and defense, and never for stealth. In battle a Master may be left alive for later negotiations.”
“Uh-huh.” Joyce was filming the huge ship, retractable antennae, the long cylinder that must be a weapon: ram tube, rocket magazine, laser, whatever.
“I have heard that your Empire prefers not to interfere with its member cultures, but sometimes it must. Is that our fate?”
“I don’t know that, either, but it’s got to be better than what you’ve been doing.” Joyce was surprised at her own vehemence. I sounded just like my father, and I never thought of myself as an Imperialist.
“Joyce, we have a great deal more to see. Shall we take a tube?”
Fatigue made her irritable. “Eudoxus, they’re too small. Anyway, why would that be easier? We’d still have to move!”
“No. Difference in air pressure moves us. To fit inside we must deflate our oversuits. Let the Messengers follow with them.”
“Done.”
Victoria came into the humans’ area of Cerberus. “Representatives of houses allied with your Empire await you,” she said. “Gather your possessions. Particularly your trade goods. You will not be returning here, and we may not be able to save this ship.”
The humans stared in astonishment. “What’s happening?” Glenda Ruth demanded.
“The Khanate comes. We have formed an alliance with Medina Trading. Their representatives await you. They call themselves Mentor and Lord Byron and you must assure them that you have been well treated. I trust there will be no difficulty with that.”
“That’s not a problem,” Freddy said. “And I can afford to lose Hecate, but just what’s about to happen to us?”
For answer Victoria pointed to an image on the telescope screen. Vermin City continued to change, to dwindle. . . was rapidly melting away, Glenda Ruth saw, leaving long bulges . . . slender spacecraft emerging from the wreckage.
“Looks familiar,” she said.
Freddy laughed. “They’re oversize copies of Hecate!”
“You’ll board the fastest of those. We’re running away. Warriors will delay the Khanate as long as they can, others will try to save this ship and any others, but we will be matching velocities with your friends, who appear to be aboard a sizable traveling fortress.”
“How fast will we be going?” Jennifer demanded.
Victoria frowned. “As swiftly as possible. Three gravities-Mote Prime gravities.”
Mote Prime was a lighter world. Freddy said, “Call it two and a half standard gee. Terry-“
“Terry can’t take that,” Jennifer said.
“No. Victoria, thanks, but-“
“You will not save your friend by being captured by the Khanate,” Victoria said. “And they might not be quite as understanding about the benefits of your cocoa. I am afraid I can leave you no choice here. Your friends will forgive us for leaving behind one human, wounded in activities he insisted on joining. They will not be so kind if we abandon you all. Come.”
“I’m staying,” Jennifer said. “Glenda Ruth, you and Freddy go. Victoria’s right, you’re important, and it won’t matter how it happened, the Empire won’t accept it if you’re lost. But someone has to take care of Terry, and you can tell them I insisted. Pollyanna-“
“Stay with Jennifer,” the Motie said. Her voice was Jennifer’s accent but in a lower register.
“Whatever we do, it must be done quickly,” Victoria warned. “A Khanate battle squadron approaches, and your friends are impatient to talk to you.”
“Battle squadron. How reasonable will they be?” Glenda Ruth demanded. “Would they talk?”
“Mediators will always talk when there is not active fighting. Sometimes then. Whether the Mediator with this expedition can speak your language is another matter, of course. You will have Pollyanna to help.”
“I will help you talk,” the Mediator pup hugged her.
She said, “You’re not trying to talk me out of staying.”
“I had hoped you would stay,” Victoria said. “Your Terry might then survive until Medina can buy him back from the Khanate. Without your help I do not think so.”
“I don’t like this much,” Freddy said. “Glenda Ruth?”
“Victoria, how will you leave them?’
Victoria chattered rapidly to a Warrior. The Warrior answered briefly. Victoria said, “We can leave you Cerberus, minus our own life support segments, and a Warrior pilot and motors to give half a gee . . . in fact, you should have Hecate’s motor of alien design, to indicate your nature. Jennifer, you might be overlooked, and if so, Medina will find you. I regret we cannot allow Dr. Doolittle to accompany you.”
“What are their chances of escape?” Glenda Ruth persisted.
“Not good,” Freddy said. “Stealthing is fine, but Cerberus needs thrust to get away from here, and they’ll see that.”
Victoria shrugged. “This is likely. If we delay much longer, none of this will matter. I will also leave recordings in the trade language, informing the Khanate that they have a valuable possession which those more powerful than the Khans will wish to buy back, but only if intact.”
“Go on, Glenda Ruth,” Jennifer said. “It’s the best we’re going to get.”
“Come,” said the Mediator. “Come meet the representatives of your friends.”
The Warrior led; then Joyce, then Eudoxus, all in skintights and helmets. Air pressure wafted them down the tube. Their insulating oversuits followed, collapsed, with two little Messengers to tend them.
Eudoxus said, “Bury’s Fyunch(click) brought us tales of swimming. Is it like this?”
“A little,” Joyce said. The currents kept her from brushing the sides. She drifted like seaweed, in a dead man’s float.
An industrial complex wafted by, brightly lighted. Where the tube curved, she could see Watchmakers following her, a swarm of them bracketed by two Engineers.
“Crazy Eddie always misreads the turning of the cycles,” Eudoxus said. “Crazy Eddie tries to arrest the turning, to make a civilization that will last for all time. What do humans think of Crazy Eddie, Joyce?”
“I suppose we think he’s crazy.” Silence prompted her to continue, “Not all that crazy, though. Our cycles of history, they go up and down but generally up. A spiral. We don’t just go round and round. We learn.”
“So you use the term without embarrassment. Crazy Eddie point our term, yes, but you don’t flinch from it. Crazy Eddie Squadron. Joyce, you’ve studied the Crazy Eddie Squadron?”
“My views are on record, Eudoxus, and you can’t have the records. Navy matters.” How the hell had Eudoxus learned that? Was there a hole Chris hadn’t plugged? So to speak.
“We are allies. It seems unfair that we cannot know what you have told every casual inhabitant of the Empire.”
“Unfair. Yes, it is, but it’s still not my decision, Eudoxus. I took an oath.”
The Motie said, “Yes, of course. Joyce, nobody loves blockade duty. The Squadron is crumbling, isn’t it? The opening of the Sister is not a bad thing for you, but how can your companions expect to create stability here?”
Good question, and Joyce didn’t know. The Empire had something, though. Something to do with the Institute, Joyce thought, and the Crazy Eddie Worm. Joyce knew only the name, and even that she must keep secret. Why? But the Mediator was behind her; her view was of Joyce’s feet, not her face.
“Mote Prime sent you ambassadors,” Eudoxus said. A Keeper and two Mediators. You’ve had thirty years to study them. We’ve studied billions of ourselves for millions of years. What can you possibly have learned that we could not?”
“Eudoxus, I am not supposed to talk about this.”
“The Imperials have told you very little, haven’t they, Joyce? They didn’t trust you to keep secrets.”
“That’s right. So there’s not much point in this, is there?”
“Yet you are a public opinion specialist. You are heard throughout the Empire. Joyce, it is clear that your Empire is united as the Moties have never been, but not every family is obedient. Has your Empire the strength to exterminate us? Is this your real plan?”
“No, we don’t plan that!”
“Are you so sure? No secret weapons? Ah, but they would not tell you. Joyce, look ahead and up.”
The ball of crumpled tinsel was a larger point among the stars. Violet sparks were rising from it. Joyce trained her pickup and spoke for continuity. “Spacecraft are rising to meet us, bringing the human hostages captured by the group our Motie allies call the Crimean Tartars. The humans are Glenda Ruth Fowler Blaine. The Hon. Frederick Townsend. Jennifer Banda of the Blaine Institute. And an engineer crewman, Terry Kakumi. . . Eudoxus, when can we talk to them? To the people who were in that ship? Did they get any pictures of the war rats? What are war rats?”
“In due time. When your friends arrive. For now-we should show you the motors.”
Joyce looked up. The crumpled ball and its sparks were setting, and the violet-white glow of Base Six’s motors was coming into view ahead. “Yes,” said Joyce. “Please.”
Eudoxus spoke into his hand. Mediators ruled all transport, Joyce remembered. And sometimes sat in judgment. The wind that moved them almost died; then the tube branched, and pressure wafted them left.
“We knew that Glenda Ruth Blaine must be daughter to Sally Fowler and Roderick Blaine, and the Honorable Frederick Townsend son to another powerful master, but we don’t know of a Blaine Institute
“It’s a school, but it does research.”
“I thought you called such organizations ‘universities.’”
“Yes, that’s right, the Blaine Institute is like a university, deliberately located next to a university, but universities everything. The Blaine Institute has only one purpose. To study Moties.”
“Ah. Was this Institute responsible for the blockade?”
“No, that was Imperial policy. Although Lord and Lady Blaine helped set the policy even as they were founding the Institute. And Lady Blaine’s uncle. But the blockade was proclaimed before I was born.” Instead of an extermination fleet. The Mediator still couldn’t see her face: right. “You can’t imagine the impact you made on the Empire. Just your existence.”
“Do you have children?”
“No. Not yet.”
“You will have?”
“Let’s leave it at ‘not yet.’”
Neither do I, of course. But I’ll see your Motie impact on the Empire and raise you not getting pregnant until you happen to feel like it!”
Jennifer’s ears felt scorched.
Eudoxus said, “Never mind. I might guess the Empire’s reaction, knowing that we’ve solved your inbuilt reason for making war and then invented our own.”
“How so?”
“Mediators prevent misunderstanding,” Eudoxus said. “Moties will fight for territory and power and resources for their descendants, but if there’s a way to avoid fighting, the Mediators will find it. You fight because messages are badly worded.”
“Oh. And invented your own, yes, of course. If you don’t get pregnant, you die. And Mediators don’t get pregnant.” I should just shut my face and give it a vacation, Joyce thought.
“The Institute, is it considered a success?”
“It gets the best minds in the Empire.”
“Yes. But such structures always freeze up, don’t they? They get old and can’t react anymore, like the Blockade Fleet.”
“Oh . . . generally.” But she hadn’t heard that about Blaine Institute. “Ossified is the word you want.”
“So they study Moties and nothing else, and they have not yet become ossified. Will they study ways to kill Moties?”
“Don’t be absurd! You’ve met Chris Blaine. His parents own the Institute. What do you think?”
“I think he has secrets, some terrible,” Eudoxus said.
So do I. Maybe enough of this. But . . . she can’t see my face, so what is she reading?
But I’m a reporter, I’m as good at controlling my face as any politico or poker player. But they put me in a silver balloon and let me get complacent and then snaked me out of it, and who ever taught me to control the muscles in my damn feet?
“Joyce, it’s important. What did you tell them?” Renner asked.
“Nothing at all,” she said, and laughed. “Look, you don’t have to keep asking. I taped it all. Here.”
“Thanks. Blaine, let’s look at this.”
The voices were identical: Joyce Trujillo’s voice, recognizable Empire-wide. The only way to tell them apart was through context. This was the alien speaking: “I think he has secrets, some terrible.”
“What do you think she meant?” Renner asked.
Chris Blaine frowned. “I don’t know. But notice the context, just after Eudoxus asked if the Institute was set up to find ways to kill Moties. If I’m reading Eudoxus right-pity the camera wasn’t on her much-“
“How could it have been?”
“I know, Joyce. Now, if I read this right, Eudoxus is convinced that Joyce doesn’t believe the Institute is for making Moties extinct, but that hasn’t laid all suspicions to rest.”
“Anything we can do about that?”
“I’ll think on it. I have some general recordings about the Institute, mostly promo stuff, but they might help. We’ll give them to Eudoxus.”
“Better review them first.”
“Sir, I did already. There’s nothing about the Empire they won’t already know. I was holding off in case I might be wrong, but now...”
“Okay. Sounds reasonable. Anything else?”
“Only the message to Weigle. It should go while East India is still willing and able to deliver it.”
“That should do it,” Chris Blaine said. He held a message cube. “All the Alderson data we can find including the stuff from Alexandria. The Admiral shouldn’t have any trouble finding the new Crazy Eddie point. Now it’s your turn, Captain. Remember, heavy on duty. You can’t lay that on too thick.”
Renner took the cube. “Thanks. I’ll be a while, and I have to be alone.” He waited until the others had left, then inserted the cube into the recorder and began to dictate.
“And that’s the situation as we see it,” he concluded. “The Moties are ripe for an alliance. It’s dicey, but there may never be a better chance.
“I don’t believe we have the power to exterminate the Moties. There are too many of them, too many independent families, scattered through the rocks and the moons and the comets.”
“We can’t exterminate them, and we never expected to maintain the blockade forever, and now we’d need two blockades. My assessment is that we’d do better to try for an alliance using the Crazy Eddie Worm to help control Motie breeding. Of course we don’t know what the Motie reaction to the worm will be, and we won’t know for another forty or fifty hours. I don’t think I should wait that long. Right now Medina Trading and East India are cooperating to send this, and they have the means to get the message through. God knows what can happen in fifty hours.”
“Kevin J. Renner, Captain, Imperial Navy Intelligence; Acting Commodore, Second Mote Expedition. Authentication follows.”
The authentication was more trouble than the message had been. Renner stretched a metallic band around his forehead and attached its cable to a small hand-held computer. Then he plugged in earphones and leaned back to relax.
“Hi,” a contralto voice said. “Your name?”
“Kevin James Renner.”
“Do you eat live snails?”
“I’ll eat anything.”
“Where were you born?”
“Dionysius.”
“Are you alone?”
“Quite alone.”
“What’s the word?”
“Hollyhocks.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure, you stupid machine.”
“Let’s try it again. What’s the word?”
“Hollyhocks.”
“Sure it’s not rosebuds?”
“Hollyhocks.”
“My instructions are to be certain you are calm and uncoerced.”
“Damn it, I am calm and uncoerced.”
“Right. If you’ll attach me to the message cube recorder.”
“You’re on.”
“Stand by. This may take a while.”
Renner waited as seven minutes went by.
“Done. You may disconnect.”
Renner took out the message cube. It was encrypted in a code that could only be read by an admiral or at a Navy Sector Headquarters; and the authentication code identified it as coming from a very senior official of Imperial Naval Intelligence. The only way to get that authentication was to convince the encrypting device that you really wanted it done. Any deviation from the script would have produced an authentication sequence that proclaimed the sender was under duress or wasn’t the proper sender. Or so Renner had been told.
Renner punched the intercom. “Okay, Blaine, here it is. You sure the Moties can manage to duplicate this at long range?” If the Moties couldn’t do that, the cube itself would have to be sent, and that would take days, if it got through at all.
“They’re sure. We sent the details of the message cube system to the East India group at the Crazy Eddie point. They’ve built a recording device. Now we send the encrypted message, they record it onto a cube, and pop it through.”
“Fine.”
“Now what?” Joyce asked.
“Now we wait,” Renner said. “For the Tartars.”