by David Brin
“Damn birds won’t admit chims are above the level of groundworms, not unless they’re forced to,” Robert commented. “They’ll try to use a machine to handle the parlay. I only hope Benjamin remembers what he’s supposed to do.”
Athaclena touched Robert’s arm, partly to remind him to keep his voice down. “He knows,” she said softly. “And he has Elayne Soo to help him.” Nevertheless, they shared a formless feeling of helplessness as they watched. This was patron-level business. Clients should not be asked to face a situation such as this alone.
The floating drone — apparently one of the Gubru’s sample collection ’bots, hastily adapted to diplomatic functions — came to a halt four meters from the advancing chims, who had already stopped and planted their banner. The robot emitted a squeal of indignant chatter that Athaclena and Robert could not quite make out. The tone, however, was peremptory.
Two of the chims backed up a step, grinning nervously.
“You can do it, Ben!” Robert growled. Athaclena saw knots stand out in his well-muscled arms. If those bulges had been Tymbrimi change glands, instead… She shivered at the comparison and looked back to the scene below.
Down in the valley, Chim Benjamin stood rock still, apparently ignoring the machine. He waited. At last its tirade ran down. There was a moment of silence. Then Benjamin made a simple arm motion — exactly as Athaclena had taught him — contemptuously dismissing the nonliving from involvement in sapient affairs.
The robot squawked again, this time louder, and with a trace of desperation.
The chims simply stood and waited, not even deigning to answer the machine. “What hauteur,” Robert sighed. “Good going, Ben. Show ’em you got class.”
Minutes passed. The tableau held.
“This convoy of Gubru came into the mountains without psi shields!” Athaclena announced suddenly. She touched her right temple as her corona waved. “That or the shields were wrecked in the attack. Either way, I can tell they are growing nervous.”
The invaders still possessed some sensors. They would be detecting movement in the forest, runners drawing nearer. The second assault group would arrive soon, this time bearing modern weapons.
The Resistance had kept its greatest power in reserve for the sake of surprise. Antimatter tended to give off resonances that were detectable from a long way away. Now, though, it was time to show all of their cards. By now the enemy would know that they were not safe, even within their armored craft.
Abruptly, and without ceremony, the robot rose and fled to the center barge. Then, after a brief pause, the lock cycled open again and a new pair of emissaries emerged.
“Kwackoo,” Robert announced.
Athaclena suppressed the glyph syrtunu. Her human friend did have a propensity for proclaiming the obvious.
The fluffy white quadrupeds, loyal clients of the Gubru, approached the parlay point gobbling to each other excitedly. They loomed large as they arrived in front of the chims. A vodor hung from one thick, feathery throat, but the translator machine remained silent.
The three chims folded their hands before themselves and bowed as one, inclining their heads to an angle of about twenty degrees. They straightened and waited.
The Kwackoo just stood there. It was apparent who was ignoring whom this time.
Through the binoculars Athaclena saw Benjamin speak. She cursed the need to watch all this without any way to listen in.
The chim’s words were effective, however. The Kwackoo chirped and blatted in flustered outrage. Through the vodor came words too faint to pick out, but the results were nearly instantaneous. Benjamin did not wait for them to finish. He and his companions picked up their banner, turned about, and marched away.
“Good fellow,” Robert said in satisfaction. He knew chims. Right now their shoulder blades must be itching terribly, yet they sauntered coolly.
The lead Kwackoo stopped speaking. It stared, nonplussed. Then it began hopping and giving out sharp cries. Its partner, too, seemed quite agitated. Now those on the hill could hear the amplified voice of the vodor, commanding “. . . come back! …” over and over again.
The chims continued walking toward the line of trees until, at last, Athaclena and Robert heard the word.
“. . .come back… PLEASE!…”
Human and Tymbrimi looked at each other and shared a smile. That was half of what this fight had been about.
Benjamin and his party halted abruptly. They turned around and sauntered back. With the spiral standard in place once more they stood silently, waiting. At last, quivering from what must have been terrible humiliation, the feathered emissaries bowed.
It was a shallow bow — hardly a bending of two out of four knees — but it served. Indentured clients of the Gubru had recognized as their equals the indentured clients of human beings. “They might have chosen death over this,” Athaclena whispered in awe, though she had planned for this very thing. “The Kwackoo are nearly sixty thousand Earth years old. Neo-chimpanzees have been sapient for only three centuries, and are the clients of wolflings.” She knew Robert would not be offended by her choice of words. “The Kwackoo are far enough along in Uplift that they have the right to choose death over this. They and the Gubru must be stupefied, and have not thought out the implications. They probably can barely believe it is happening.”
Robert grinned. “Just wait till they hear the rest of it. They’ll wish they’d chosen the easy way out.”
The chims answered the bow at the same angle. Then, with that distasteful formality out of the way, one of the giant avioids spoke quickly, its vodor mumbling an Anglic translation.
“The Kwackoo are probably demanding to speak with the leaders of the ambush,” Robert commented, and Athaclena agreed.
Benjamin betrayed his nervousness by using his hands as he replied. But that was no real problem. He gestured at the ruins, at the destroyed hover tanks, at the helpless barges and the forest on all sides, where vengeful forces were converging to finish the job.
“He’s telling them he is the leader.”
That was the script, of course. Athaclena had written it, amazed all the while how easily she had adapted from the subtle Tymbrimi art of dissemblement to the more blatant, human technique of outright lying.
Benjamin’s hand gestures helped her follow the conversation. Through empathy and her own imagination, she felt she could almost fill in the rest.
“We have lost our patrons,” Benjamin had rehearsed saying. “You and your masters have taken them from us. We miss them, and long for their return. Still, we know that helpless mourning would not make them proud of us. Only by action may we show how well we have been uplifted.
“We are therefore doing as they have taught us — behaving as sapient creatures of thought and honor.
“In honor’s name then, and by the Codes of War, I now demand that you and your masters offer their parole, or face the consequences of our legal and righteous wrath!”
“He is doing it,” Athaclena whispered half in wonder.
Robert coughed as he tried not to laugh aloud. The Kwackoo seemed to grow more and more distressed as Benjamin spoke. When he finished, the feathery quadrupeds hopped and squawked. They puffed and preened and objected loudly.
Benjamin, though, would not be bluffed. He referred to his wrist chronometer then spoke three words.
The Kwackoo suddenly stopped protesting. Orders must have arrived, for all at once they bowed again, swiveled, and sped back to the center barge at a gallop.
The sun had risen above the line of hills to the east. Splashes of morning light blazed through the lanes of shattered trees. It grew warm out on the parlay ground, but the chims stood and waited. At intervals Benjamin glanced to his watch and called out the time remaining.
At the edge of the forest Athaclena saw their special weapons team begin setting up their only antimatter projector. Certainly the Gubru were aware of it, too.
She heard Robert softly counting out the minutes.
Finally — in fact nearly at the very last moment — the hatches of all three hover craft opened. From each emerged a procession. The entire complement of Gubru, dressed in the glistening robes of senior patrons, led the way. They crooned a high-pitched song, accompanied by the basso of their faithful Kwackoo.
The pageantry was steeped in ancient tradition. It had its roots in epochs long before life had crawled ashore on the Earth. It wasn’t hard to imagine how nervous Benjamin and the others must feel as those to be paroled assembled before them. Robert’s own mouth felt dry. “Remember to bow again,” he urged in a whisper.
Athaclena smiled, having the advantage of her corona. “Have no fear, Robert. He will remember.” And indeed, Benjamin folded his hands before him in the deeply respectful fashion of a junior client greeting a senior patron. The chims bowed low.
Only a flash of white betrayed the fact that Benjamin was grinning from ear to ear.
“Robert,” she said, nodding in satisfaction. “Your people have done very well by theirs, in only four hundred years.”
“Don’t give us the credit,” he answered. “It was all there in the raw from the start.”
The paroled avians departed toward the Valley of the Sind on foot. No doubt they would be picked up before long. Even if they were not, Athaclena had ordered that word go out. They were to reach home base unmolested. Any chim who touched one feather would be outlawed, his plasm dumped into sewers, his gene-line extinguished. The matter was that serious.
The procession disappeared down the mountain road. Then the hard work began.
Crews of chims hurried to strip the abandoned vehicles in the precious time remaining before retribution arrived. Gorillas chuffed impatiently, grooming and signing to one another as they awaited loads to carry off into the hills.
By then Athaclena had already moved her command post to a spine-covered ridge two miles farther into the mountains. She watched through binoculars as the last salvage was loaded and hauled away, leaving nearly empty hulks under the shadows of the ruined buildings.
Robert had left much earlier, at Athaclena’s insistence. He was departing again on another mission tomorrow and needed to get his rest.
Her corona waved, and she kenned Benjamin before his softly slapping feet could be heard padding up the trail. When he spoke his voice was somber.
“General, we’ve had word by semaphore that the attacks in the Sind failed. A few Eatee construction sites were blown up, but the rest of the assault was nearly a total disaster.”
Athaclena closed her eyes. She had expected as much. They had too many security problems down below, for one thing. Fiben had suspected the town-side resistance was compromised by traitors.
And yet Athaclena had not disallowed the attacks. They had served a valuable purpose by distracting the Gubru defense forces, keeping their quick-reaction fighters busy for from here. She only hoped that not too many chims had lost their lives drawing the invader’s ire.
“The day balances out,” she told her aide. Their victories would have to be symbolic, she knew. To try to expel the enemy with forces such as theirs would be futile. With her growing knack at metaphors she likened it to a caterpillar attempting to move a tree.
No, what we win, we will achieve through subtlety.
Benjamin cleared his throat. Athaclena looked down at him. “You still do not believe we should have let them leave alive,” she told him.
He nodded. “No, ser, I do not. I think I understand some of what you told me about symbolism and all that… and I’m proud you seem to think we handled the parole ceremony all right. But I still believe we should’ve burned them all.”
“Out of revenge?”
Benjamin shrugged. They both knew that was how the majority of the chims felt. They couldn’t care less about symbols. The races of Earth tended to look upon all the bowing and fine class distinctions of the Galactics as the mincing foolishness of a mired, decadent civilization.
“You know that’s not what I think,” Benjamin said. “I’d go along with your logic — about us scoring a real coup here today just by getting them to talk to us — if it weren’t for one thing.”
“What thing is that?”
“The birds had a chance to snoop around the center. They saw traces of Uplift. And I can’t rule out the possibility they caught a glimpse of the gorillas themselves, through the trees!” Benjamin shook his head. “I just don’t think we should’ve allowed them to walk out of here after that,” he said.
Athaclena put a hand on her aide’s shoulder. She did not speak because there did not seem to be anything to say.
How could she explain it to Benjamin?
Syulff-kuonn took form over her head, whirling with satisfaction at the progress of things, things her father had planned.
No, she could not explain to Benjamin that she had insisted on bringing the gorillas along, on making them part of the raid, as a step in a long, involved, and very practical joke.
48
Fiben and Gailet
“Keep your head down!” Fiben growled.
“Will you stop snapping at me?” Gailet answered hotly. She lifted her eyes just to the tops of the surrounding grass stems. “I just want to see if—”
The words cut off as Fiben swept her supporting arms out from under her. She landed with a grunt of expelled air and rolled over spitting dirt. “You pit-scratching, flea-bitten—”
Her eyes remained eloquent even with Fiben’s hand clamped firmly over her mouth. “I told you,” he whispered. “With their sensors, if you can see them it means they’ve got to see you. Our only chance is to crawl like worms until we can find a way to blend back into the civilian chim population.!”
From not far away came the hum of agricultural machinery. The sound had drawn them here. If they could only get close enough to mingle with the farmers, they might yet escape the invaders’ dragnet.
For all Fiben knew, he and Gailet might be the only survivors of the ill-fated uprising in the valley. It was hard to imagine how the mountain guerrillas under Athaclena’s command could have done any better. The insurrection seemed all washed up from where he lay.
He drew back his hand from Gailet’s mouth. If looks could kill, he thought, contemplating the expression in her eyes. With her hair matted and mud-splattered, she was hardly the picture of the serene chimmie intellectual.
“I … thought… you… said …” she whispered deliberately, emphasizing calmness, “that the enemy couldn’t detect us if we wear only native-made materials.”
“That’s if they’re being lazy and only counting on their secret weapon. But don’t forget they’ve also got infrared, radar, seismic sonar, psi — ” He stopped suddenly. A low whine approached from his left. If it was the harvester they had heard before, there might be a chance to catch a ride.
“Wait here,” he whispered.
Gailet grabbed his wrist. “No! I’m coming with you!” She looked quickly left and right, then lowered her eyes. “Don’t… don’t leave me alone.”
Fiben bit his lip. “All right. But stay down low, right behind me.”
They moved single file, hugging the ground. Slowly the whine grew louder. Soon Fiben felt a faint tingling up the back of his neck.
Gravities, he thought. It’s close.
How close he didn’t realize until the machine slipped over the grasstops, coming into view just two meters away.
He had been expecting a large vehicle. But this thing was about the size of a basketball and was covered with silvery and glassy knobs — sensors. It bobbed gently in the afternoon breeze, regarding them.
Aw hell. He sighed, sitting up on his haunches and letting his arms drop in resignation. Not far away he heard faint voices. No doubt this thing’s owners.
“It’s a battle drone, isn’t it?” Gailet asked tiredly.
He nodded. “A sniffer. Cheap model, I think. But good enough to find and hold us.”
“What do we do?”
He shrugged. “
What can we do? We’d better surrender.”
Behind his back, however, he sifted through the dark soil. His fingers closed around a smooth stone.
The distant voices were coming this way. What th’ heck, he thought.
“Listen, Gailet. When I move, duck. Get outta here. Get your notes to Athaclena, if she’s still alive.”
Then, before she could ask any questions, he let out a shout and hurled the stone with all his might.
Several things happened all at once. Pain erupted in Fiben’s right wrist. There was a flash of light, so bright that it dazzled him. Then, during his leap forward, countless stinging pinpricks rained up and down his chest.
As he sailed toward the thing a sudden, strange feeling overcame Fiben, one that said that he had performed this act before — lived this particular moment of violence — not once or twice, but a hundred times, in a hundred prior lives. The wave of familiarity, hooked on the flickering edge of memory, washed over him as he dove through the drone’s pulsing gravitic field to wrap himself over the alien machine.
The world bucked and spun as the thing tried to throw him off. Its laser blasted at his shadow and grass fires broke out. Fiben held on for his life as the fields and the sky blended in a sickening blur.
The induced sense of déjà vu actually seemed to help! Fiben felt as if he had done this countless times! A small, rational corner of his mind knew that he hadn’t, but the memory misfunction said different and gave him a false confidence he badly needed right then as he dared to loosen the grip of his injured right hand and fumbled for the robot’s control box.
Ground and sky merged. Fiben tore a fingernail prying at the lid, breaking the lock. He reached in, grabbed wires.
The machine spun and careened, as if sensing his intention. Fiben’s legs lost their grip and whipped out. He was whirled around like a rag doll. When his left hand gave way he held on only by a weakening grip on the wires themselves — round and round and round…
At that moment only one thing in the world was not a blur: the lens of the robot’s laser, directly in front of him.