by David Brin
That still didn’t make the discrimination smell good to Fiben.
“Feelin” any better?”
“Hmm?” Fiben looked up.
“Your muscles.” Max gestured. “Feelin’ less sore now?”
Fiben had to grin. Max had apologized all too often, first fordoing nothing when the Probationers began harassing him back at the Ape’s Grape, and later shooting him with the stunner on Gailet’s orders. Of course both actions were understandable in retrospect. Neither he nor Gailet had known what to make of Fiben, at first, and had decided to err on the side of Caution. %
“Yeah, lots better. Just a twinge now and then. Thanks.”
“Mmm, good. Glad.” Max nodded, satisfied. Privately, Fiben noted that he had never heard Gailet express any regret over what he’d gone through.
Fiben tightened another bolt on the sand-lawn groomer he had been repairing. It was a real breakdown, of course, just in case a Gubru patrol stopped by. But luck had been with them so far. Anyway, most of the invaders seemed to be down at the south side of Aspinal Bay, supervising another of their mysterious construction projects.
He slipped a monocular out of his belt and focused on the Embassy. A low plastic fence topped with glittering wire surrounded the compound, punctuated at intervals by tiny whirling watch buoys. The little spinning disks looked decorative, but Fiben knew better. The protection devices made any direct assault by irregular forces impossible.
Inside the compound there were five buildings. The largest, the chancery, had come equipped with a full suite of modern radio, psi, and quantum wave antennae — an obvious reason why the Gubru moved in after the former tenants cleared out.
Before the invasion, the Embassy staff had been mostly hired humans and chims. The only Tymbrimi actually assigned to this tiny outpost were the ambassador, his assistant/pilot, and his daughter.
The invaders weren’t following that example. The place swarmed with avian forms. Only one small building — at the top of the far hill across from Fiben, overlooking the ocean — did not show a full complement of Gubru and Kwackoo constantly coming and going. That pyramidal, windowless structure looked more like a cairn than a house, and none of the aliens approached within two hundred meters of it.
Fiben remembered something the general had told him before he left the mountains.
“If you get an opportunity, Fiben, please inspect the Diplomatic Cache at the Embassy. If, by some chance, the Gubru have left the grounds intact, there might be a message from my father there.”
Athaclena’s ruff had flared momentarily.
“And if the Gubru have violated the Cache, I must know of that, too. It is information we can use.”
It looked unlikely he’d have had a chance to do as she asked, whether the aliens respected the Codes or not. The general would have to settle for a visual report from far away.
“What d’you see?” Max asked. He calmly munched his sandwich as if one started a guerrilla uprising every day.
“Just a minute.” Fiben increased magnification and wished he had a better glass. As far as he could tell, the cairn at the top of the hill looked unmolested. A tiny blue light winked from the top of the little structure. Had the Gubru put it there? he wondered.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think—”
His belt phone beeped — another bit of normal life that might end once fighting began. The commercial network was still in operation, though certainly monitored by Gubru language computers.
He picked up the phone. “That you, honey? I’ve been getting hungry. I hope you brought my lunch.”
There was a pause. When Gailet Jones spoke there was an edge in her voice. “Yes, dear.” She stuck to their agreed-upon code, but obviously did not relish it. “Pele’s marriage group is on holiday today, so I invited them to join us for a picnic.”
Fiben couldn’t help digging a little — just for verisimilitude, of course. “That’s fine, darling. Maybe you an’ I can find time to slip into the woods for some, y’know, ook ook.”
Before she could do more than gasp, he signed off. “See you in a little while, sweetie.” Putting down the phone, he saw Max looking at him, a wad of food in one cheek. Fiben raised an eyebrow and Max shrugged, as if to say, “None of my business.”
“I better go see that Dwayne ain’t screwed up,” Max said. He stood and dusted sand from his coveralls. “Scopes up, Fiben.”
“Filters up, Max.”
The big chim nodded and moved off down the hill, sauntering as if life were completely normal.
Fiben slapped the cover back on the engine and started the groomer. Its motor whistled with the soft whine of hydrogen catalysis. He hopped aboard and took off slowly down the hill.
The park was fairly crowded for a weekday afternoon. That was part of the plan, to get the birds used to chims behaving in unusual ways. Chims had been frequenting the area more and more during the last week.
That had been Athaclena’s idea. Fiben wasn’t sure he liked it, but oddly enough, it was one Tymbrimi suggestion Gailet had taken up wholeheartedly. An anthropologist’s gambit. Fiben sniffed.
He rode over to a copse of willows by a stream not far from the Embassy grounds, near the fence and the small, whirling watchers. He stopped the engine and got off. Walking to the edge of the stream, he took several long strides and leapt up onto the trunk of a tree. Fiben clambered to a convenient branch, where he could look out onto the compound. He took out a bag of peanuts and began to crack them one at a time.
The nearest watcher disk seemed to pause briefly. No doubt it had already scanned him with everything from X-rays to radar. Of course it found him unarmed and harmless. Every day for the last week a different chim had taken his lunch break here at about this time of day.
Fiben recalled the evening at the Ape’s Grape. Perhaps Athaclena and Gailet had a point, he thought. If the birds try to condition us, why can’t we turn the tables and do it to the birds?
His phone rang again.
“Yeah?”
“Uh, I’m afraid Donal’s suffering from a little flatulence. He may not be able to make it to the picnic.”
“Aw, too bad,” he muttered, and put the phone away. So far, so good. He cracked another peanut. The D-17 had been put into the pipes delivering hydrogen to the Embassy. It would still be several minutes before anything could be expected to happen.
It was a simple idea, even if he had his doubts. The sabotage was supposed to look like an accident, and it had to be timed so that Gailet’s unarmed contingent was in position. This raid was meant not so much to do harm as to create a disturbance. Both Gailet and Athaclena wanted information on Gubru emergency procedures.
Fiben was to be the general’s eyes and ears.
Over on the grounds he saw avians come and go from the chancery and other buildings. The little blue light atop the Diplomatic Cache winked against the bright sea clouds. A Gubru floater hummed overhead and began to settle toward the broad Embassy lawn. Fiben watched with interest, waiting for the excitement to begin.
D-17 was a powerful corrosive when left in contact with town-gas hydrogen for long. It would soon eat through the pipes. Then, when exposed to air, it would have yet another effect.
It would stink to high heaven.
He didn’t have long to wait.
Fiben smiled as the first squawks of consternation began to emanate from the chancery. Within moments the doors and windows burst forth with feathered explosions as aliens boiled out of the building, chirping in panic or disgust. Fiben wasn’t sure which and he didn’t really care. He was too busy laughing.
This part had been his idea. He broke a peanut and tossed it up to catch in his mouth. This was better than baseball!
Gubru scattered in all directions, leaping from upper balconies even without antigravity gear. Several writhed on broken limbs.
So much the better. Of course this wasn’t going to be much of an inconvenience to the enemy, and it could only be done once. The real
purpose was to watch how the Gubru dealt with an emergency.
Sirens began to wail. Fiben glanced at his watch. A full two minutes had passed since the first signs of commotion. That meant the alarm was given manually. The vaunted Galactic defense computers weren’t omniscient then. They weren’t equipped to respond to a bad smell.
The watch buoys rose from the fence together, giving off a threatening whine, whirling faster than before. Fiben brushed peanut shells from his lap and sat up slowly, watching the deadly things warily. If they were programmed to extend the defense perimeter automatically, whatever the emergency, he could be in trouble.
But they merely spun, shining with increased vigilance. It took three more minutes, by Fiben’s watch, for a triple sonic boom to announce the arrival of fighter craft, sleek arrows resembling sparrow hawks, which streaked in to pass low over the now empty chancery building. The Gubru on the lawn seemed too nervous to take much cheer in their arrival. They leapt and squawked as sonic booms shook trees and feathers alike.
A Gubru official strutted about the grounds, chirping soothingly, calming its subordinates. Fiben didn’t dare lift his monocular with the protector-drones at such high alert, but he peered to try to get a better view of the avian in charge. Several features seemed odd about this Gubru. Its white plumage, for instance, looked more luminous, more lustrous than the others’. It also wore a band of black fabric around its throat.
A few minutes later a utility craft arrived and hovered until enough chattering avians had stepped aside to give it room to land. From the grounded floater a pair of invaders emerged wearing ornate, crested breathing masks. They bowed to the official, then strode up the steps and into the building.
Obviously the Gubru in charge realized that the stench from the corroded gas pipes posed no threat. All the noise and commotion was doing much more harm to his command of clerks and planners than the bad smell. No doubt he was upset because the work day was ruined.
More minutes passed. Fiben watched a convoy of ground vehicles arrive, sirens wailing, sending the agitated civil servants into a tizzy again. The senior Gubru flapped its arms until the racket finally cut off. Then the aristocrat waved a curt gesture at the supersonic fighters hovering overhead.
The warcraft swiveled about at once and departed as swiftly as they had come. Shock waves again rattled windows and sent the chancery staff shrieking.
“Excitable lot, aren’t they?” Fiben observed. No doubt Gubru soldiery were better conditioned for this sort of thing.
Fiben stood up on his branch and looked over toward other areas of the park. Elsewhere the fence was lined with chims, and more streamed in from the city. They kept a respectful distance back from the barrier guardians, but still they came, babbling to each other in excitement.
Here and there among them were Gailet Jones’s observers, timing and jotting down every alien response.
“Almost the first thing the Gubru will read about, when they study Library tapes on your species,” Athaclena had told him, “will be the so-called ‘monkey reflex’… the tendency of you anthropoids to scurry toward commotion, out of curiosity.
“Conservative species find it strange, and this tendency of humans and chims will seem particularly bizarre to avian beings, which tend to lack even a semblance of a sense of humor.”
She had smiled.
“We will get them used to this type of behavior, until they grow to expect those strange Earthling clients always running toward trouble… just to watch.
“They will learn not to fear you, but they should… speaking as one monkey to another.”
Fiben had known what she meant, that Tymbrimi were like humans and chims in this way. Her confidence had filled him, as well — until he saw her frown suddenly -and speak to herself, quickly and softly, apparently forgetting that he understood Galactic Seven.
“Monkeys… one monkey to another… Sumbaturalli! Must I constantly think in metaphors?”
It had perplexed Fiben. Fortunately, he did not have to understand Athaclena, only know that she could ask anything she wanted of him and he would jump.
After a while more maintenance workers arrived in ground vehicles, this time including a number of chims wearing uniforms of the City Gas Department. By the time they entered the chancery, the Gubru bureaucrats on the lawn had settled into the shade just outside, chirping irritably at the still potent stench.
Fiben didn’t blame them. The wind had shifted his way. His nose wrinkled in disgust.
Well, that’s that. We cost them an afternoon’s work, and maybe we learned something. Time to go home and assess the results.
He didn’t look forward to the meeting with Gailet Jones. For a pretty and bright chimmie, she had a tendency to get awfully officious. And she obviously bore some grudge against him — as if he had gunned her down with a stunner and carried her off in a sack!
Ah well. Tonight he would be off, back into the mountains with Tycho, carrying a report for the general. Fiben had been born a city boy, but he had come to prefer the kind of birds they had out in the country to the sort infesting town of late.
He turned around, grabbed the tree trunk with both arms, and started lowering himself. That was when, suddenly, something that felt like a big flat hand slammed hard against his back, knocking all the breath out of him.
Fiben clawed at the trunk. His head rang and tears filled his eyes. He managed just barely to keep his grip on the rough bark as branches whipped and leaves blew away in a sudden wave of palpable sound. He held on while the entire tree rocked, as if it were trying to buck him off!
His ears popped as the overpressure wave passed. The rip of rushing air dropped to a mere roar. The tree swayed in slowly diminishing arcs. Finally — still gripping the bark tightly — he gathered the nerve to turn around and look.
A towering column of smoke filled the center of the Embassy lawn where the chancery used to be. Flames licked at shattered walls, and streaks of soot showed where superheated gas had blasted in all directions.
Fiben blinked.
“Hot chicken in a biscuit!” he muttered, not ashamed at all of the first thing to come to mind. There was enough fried bird out there to feed half of Port Helenia. Some of the meat was pretty rare, of course. Some of it still moved.
His mouth was bone dry, but he smacked his lips nonetheless.
“Barbecue sauce,” he sighed. “All this, an’ not a truck-load of barbecue sauce to be seen.”
He clambered back onto the branch amid the torn leaves. Fiben checked his watch. It took almost a minute for sirens to begin wailing again. Another for the floater to take off, wavering as it fought the surging convection of superheated air from the fire.
He looked to see what the chims at the perimeter fence had done. Through the spreading cloud of smoke, Fiben saw that the crowd had not fled. If anything, it had grown. Chims boiled out of nearby buildings to watch. There were hoots and shrieks, a sea of excited brown eyes.
He grunted in satisfaction. That was fine, so long as nobody made any threatening moves.
Then he noticed something else. With an electric thrill he saw that the watch disks were down! All along the barrier fence, the guardian buoys had fallen to the ground.
“Bugger all!” he murmured. “The dumb clucks are saving money on smart robotics. The defense mechs were all remotes!”
When the chancery blew up — for whatever ungodly reason it had chosen to do so — it must have taken out the central controller with it! If somebody just had the presence of mind to grab up some of those buoys…
He saw Max, a hundred meters to his left, scurry over to one of the toppled disks and prod it with a stick.
Good man, Fiben thought, and then dropped it from his mind. He stood up and leaned against the tree trunk while tossing off his sandals. He flexed his legs, testing the support. Here goes nothiri, he sighed.
Fiben took off at full tilt, running along the narrow branch. At the last moment he rode the bucking tip like a springboard and
leaped off into the air.
The fence was set back a way from the stream. One of Fiben’s toes brushed the wire at the top as he sailed over. He landed in an awkward rollout on the lawn beyond.
“Oof,” he complained. Fortunately, he hadn’t banged his still-tender ankle. But his ribs hurt, and as he panted sucked in a lungful of smoke from the spreading fire. Coughing, he pulled a handkerchief from his coveralls and wrapped it over his nose as he ran toward the devastation.
Dead invaders lay strewn across the once pristine lawn. He leapt over a sprawled, Kwackoo corpse — four-legged and soot-covered — and ducked through a roiling finger of smoke. He barely evaded collision with a living Gubru. The creature fled squawking.
The invader bureaucrats were completely disorganized, flapping and running about in total chaos. Their noise was overwhelming.
Slamming sonic booms announced the return of soldiery, overhead. Fiben suppressed a fit of coughing and blessed the smoke. No one overhead would spot him, and the Gubru down here were in no condition to notice much. He hopped over singed avians. The stench from the fire kept even his most atavistic appetites at bay.
In fact, he was afraid he might be sick.
It was touch and go as he ran past the burning chancery. The building was completely in flames. The hair on his right arm curled from the heat.
He burst upon a knot of avians huddling in the shadow of a neighboring structure. They had been gathered in a moaning cluster around one particular corpse, a remnant whose once-bright plumage was now stained and ruined. When Fiben appeared so suddenly the Gubru scattered, chirping in dismay.
Am I lost? There was smoke everywhere. He swiveled about, casting for a sign of the right direction.
There! Fiben spied a tiny blue glow through the black haze. He set off at a run, though his lungs already felt afire. The worst of the noise and heat fell behind him as he dashed through the small copse of trees lining the top of the bluff.
Misjudging the distance, he almost stumbled, sliding to a sudden halt before the Tymbrimi Diplomatic Cache. Panting, he bent over to catch his breath.
In a moment he realized that it was just as well he’d stopped when he had. Suddenly the blue globe at the cairn’s peak seemed less friendly. It pulsed at him, throbbing volubly.