It troubled Desvendapur, but not to the point of preventing him from engaging in conversation with Ulu. They spoke about alien foodstuffs and their sometimes eccentric preparation, Des giving the impression he knew a great deal while in reality he was utterly ignorant on the subject. But the more Ulu talked, the more Des ‘tested’ and ‘checked’ him, the greater grew the poet’s rapidly burgeoning store of knowledge. By the time they reached the checkpoint, he felt he could have carried on a limited conversation on the subject. Certainly he now knew more about it than any nonspecialist.
It was rare to see a hive tunnel blocked or guarded. Desvendapur supposed that access to military installations was similarly restricted, as was that leading to sensitive scientific installations, but this was the first time in his life he had actually encountered an armed guard. One of the pair recognized Ulunegjeprok immediately. Des tensed when the no-nonsense sentry turned his attention to the truck’s passenger. But it was late in the day and the guard was tired. When Ulu cheerily explained that his passenger was another newly arrived worker assigned to his own section, the body-armored thranx accepted the explanation readily. There was no reason not to. Why would anyone not ordered to do so want to willingly place himself in close proximity to a bunch of soft-bodied, pinch-featured, antenna-less, malodorous mammals? The truck was waved through.
They entered a much longer tunnel, featureless except for periodic electronic checkpoints. Their progress was being monitored, Des realized. The amount of security was daunting. How long he would be able to continue to brazen his way through he did not know. Long enough to gain inspiration for a small volume of stanzas, he hoped. Phrases, at last, that would be underlain with real meaning and significance. After what he had gone through to get this far, he had better accomplish at least that much.
Would Melnibicon notice that the lifter’s navigation system had been accessed? Would it occur to her to recheck a preprogrammed course that the craft had followed faultlessly many times before? If she did, then he would have only hours of freedom in which to seek inspiration. If she did not, and relaxed on board as she had on the flight over, then he might have a day or two in which to interact with the aliens and the storm of exotic sights and sounds they hopefully represented before Security caught up with him. As for Melnibicon, her hastily reprogrammed lifter would set her down automatically among the rilthy peaks, whereupon if he had done his work properly the flight instrumentation would then freeze up and compel her to call for rescue.
It never occurred to him while he had been entering his irate, hasty adjustments that the disoriented craft might simply run into the side of a mountain.
For a service tunnel, the corridor they were speeding down seemed to go on forever. Locked into the passageway’s guide strip, Ulunegjeprok abandoned the controls to let the truck do its own driving. He would return to manual when necessary.
“So, where did you study?” he inquired innocently of his newly arrived counterfeit colleague.
Nothing if not voluble, Des spun an elaborate story woven around what he knew of Hivehom. Since Ulu was a native of Willow-Wane and had never been offworld, he could hardly catch Des in any mistakes. By the time the truck finally began to slow as they approached another floor-to-ceiling barrier, the poet had half convinced himself of his own skill at food preparation.
He held his breath, but the facility on the other side of the seal was disappointingly ordinary. Certainly there was nothing to indicate the presence of aliens. He was reluctant to press Ulu for details lest he appear too eager. Besides, the less he opened his mouthparts, the better. Silence was the best way of hiding ignorance.
Turning down a subsidiary corridor, Ulunegjeprok eventually parked the truck in a vacant unloading slot. Wordlessly, acting as though he knew exactly what he was doing and that he belonged, Des proceeded to help him unload. The kitchen facilities were extensive, spotless, and more or less familiar, though he did espy several devices whose purpose was foreign to him. That did not necessarily mean they were intended for the preparation of mammalian food, he reminded himself. He was a poet, not a cook, and the only food preparation equipment he was familiar with was the individual kind that he had made use of personally.
Encountering and finding himself introduced to a couple of Ulu’s coworkers, he was delighted to discover that he could pass himself off as a colleague with a certain aplomb. They in turn were able to present him to still others, with the result that by nightfall he was an accepted member of the staff. Thus accredited through personal contact, his presence was not further remarked upon. He even assisted in the preparation of the nighttime meal, noting that for this purpose the staff responsible for the preparation of the alien food had the extensive facility entirely to themselves.
To his surprise he discovered among the courses a number that were familiar to him. He did not comment on this revelation lest he expose his ignorance. But it was fascinating to learn that the humans could eat thranx food.
“Not all of it, of course,” Ulu remarked in the course of their work, “but then you know that already. Fortunately, they don’t ask us to assist in the treatment of meat.”
“Meat?” Desvendapur was not sure he had heard the preparator correctly.
“That’s right, joke about it,” Ulu whistled. “I cannot imagine it myself. They warned us when we were taking the special courses, but still, the idea of intelligent creatures consuming the flesh of others of their own immediate family was more than a little terrifying. Didn’t you find it so?”
“Oh, absolutely.” Desvendapur was quick to improvise. “Meat eaters! The proclivity seems utterly incompatible with true intelligence.”
“I have not seen them do it myself. I do remember asking, early on in the first seminar, why they did not just do all their own food preparation, but as you know the idea is to encourage them to become as comfortable as possible here. That means learning to eat food that we prepare.” He whistled a soft chuckle. “What the media would not give to know that the only contact project isn’t on Hivehom.” Light flashed from his compound eyes as he looked over at Des, who was whitened up to his foothands in something called flour. “Wouldn’t it be funny if you were a correspondent who had slipped in here under cover, and not a preparator assistant?”
Desvendapur laughed in what he fervently hoped was an unforced manner. “What an amusing notion, Ulu! Naturally, I am as sworn to secrecy as everyone else who has been chosen to work with the aliens.”
“Naturally.” Ulunegjeprok was forming the flour into loaves. Watching and learning something new and useful every minute, Des imitated him with rapidly accelerating skill. Alien food formed the basis for a nice quatrain or two, but where were the aliens themselves? Where? Would he have the opportunity not simply to prepare their food but to see them eat? To observe their flexible mouthparts in motion and see the long pink tongue thing that resided, like some symbiotic slug, within their mouths? That would provide inspiration for more than a few stanzas! Horror was always an efficacious stimulus.
He did not get his wish. The food was taken from them for final treatment and delivery, leaving the prep staff alone in the kitchen to clean up before retiring. Desvendapur followed Ulu to his quarters, memorizing sights and routes, learning something new and useful with every step.
“I have to present myself and my credentials in the morning, so I will be late to work,” he told Ulu as they were preparing to retire. “Meanwhile, thank you for all that you have done, and for your hospitality tonight.”
“Glad to be of help,” the preparator replied guilelessly. “All kitchen assistance gratefully welcomed. You’re good at your work.”
“I had excellent instruction.” By now Desvendapur had come to believe it himself. As of this moment he was not only an amateur poet, but a professional food preparator, one specializing in alien cuisine, who was and always had been a denizen of large, professional kitchens.
The death of Melnibicon, when he learned of it the following morning, th
reatened to shatter his resolve as much as his confidence. He had never intended for her to die, only to be delayed a day or so while he penetrated the secrets of Geswixt. But he was forced to set aside the overwhelming sense of guilt as he considered the ramifications of the corollary knowledge that in addition to her passing, the crash of the lifter had also resulted in the death of one Desvendapur, poet and soother, whom she had illegally transported to Geswixt for an afternoon. It seemed that neither body had been recoverable from the incinerated crash site.
He had become an instant nonperson. Desvendapur the soother no longer existed. His family and clan would grieve. So might Heul, for a short while. Then all would go on with their lives. As for himself, he had a chance to begin a new one—as a simple, hardworking, lowly food preparator for humans.
But first he needed a place to sleep, not to mention an identity.
There were a number of empty living cubicles. Settling on one located as far from the nearest inhabited space as possible, he moved himself in. The dearth of personal possessions within might puzzle a visitor, but he did not expect to have much in the way of company. His personal credit having perished along with his former identity, he would have to establish a new one with the fiscal facilities in Geswixt.
Altering a personal identity chit was a serious crime, but such ethical considerations no longer weighed heavily on Des. Not after having committed, however inadvertently, a killing. Artists died for their art, he rationalized. Melnibicon had died for his. He would compose a suitable, grand memorial to her in dance verse. It would be more honor than someone like herself was due or would normally rate. She should be grateful. Certainly her clan and family would be. Meanwhile, he had more important things to do than mourn the passing of someone who was, after all, practically a complete stranger, and an individual of indisputably little importance.
With the aid of the electronics in the cubicle it turned out to be surprisingly easy to forge a new identity. It helped that he was not attempting to have his new self classified as a specialist in military weaponry, or a communications expert, or a financial facilitator. Who would want to assume a false identity as a bottom-level food preparator? With a few delicate cybernetic twitches, his name became Desvenbapur, a change sufficiently significant to render him wholly separate and apart from the dead poet, but not radical enough to make a mess of his original identity chit.
He waited tensely while the hive network processed his work. Because he had a position, because he was there, because he could now rely on the confirmation of others to support his new self, it was accepted, showing a credit balance of zero. Because he had been acknowledged by the system, no one thought to question his presence. With each succeeding day, Desvenbapur the assistant food preparator became a more familiar and well-liked figure around the complex. With each succeeding week, applying himself intensely to a job classification for which he was seriously overqualified, he grew more and more adept at its practice.
A day came when a newly arrived sanitation tech appeared, luggage in tow, to claim his previously unassigned cubicle. Finding someone already living within, both thranx referred the situation to the official in charge of housing. Preoccupied with more serious matters, she acknowledged that it was clear some degree of oversight had been at work. With Ulunegjeprok and other coworkers vouching for the amiable Des, she simply reassigned the newcomer to a different vacant cubicle, at which point the shelter the poet had earlier appropriated was officially entered into the hive records as his.
With an official residence, an accepted line of credit into which seasonal income was placed—as soon as the hive financial officer was informed by Des’s friends that he was not being paid, the oversight was hastily corrected—and an occupation, Desvendapur’s reinvention as Desvenbapur was complete. The chance of exposure still existed, but with each succeeding day it became less and less likely. Finding himself gifted with another highly efficient and willing assistant who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, the food division supervisor was more than happy to have the additional, to all intents and purposes legitimate, help. Des’s name began to creep, by default, into the official records of daily life at the complex. Desvenbapur the food preparator came into conclusive existence through the inherited process of bureaucratic osmosis.
He learned that anyone associating in any capacity, however distant, with the visiting humans was encouraged to learn more about them. Des was quick to take advantage of these free educational facilities. His off-duty hours were spent poring over the history of thranx-human contact, the official records of the ongoing project on Hivehom, and the hesitant but ongoing attempts to broaden contact between the two radically different, cautious species. There was nothing in the official records about another project at Geswixt. As far as publicly available history went, the complex did not exist.
He was afraid to be promoted, but commendations came his way in spite of his efforts to avoid them. The alternative was to work less diligently, to slack off on the job, but that might attract even more attention, and of an unwanted sort. So while striving to endear himself to his coworkers, he struggled to do that work which was assigned to him and little more, seeking safety in anonymity.
Already more knowledgeable about human food intake than all but the biochemists and other specialists, Desvendapur absorbed what knowledge was available about everything from the bipeds’ appearance to their tastes in art and amusement to their mating habits. That a great deal was marked unknown did not surprise him. Though improving, contact between the species was still tentative and infrequent, proceeding officially only at the single recognized project site on Hivehom.
The reason for the clandestine complex at Geswixt was obvious: Both sides wanted to speed the pace of contact, to increase the opportunities for an exchange of views, and to stimulate learning. But it had to be done in such a way as not to alarm the general populace. Even after some fourteen years, each side was still far from confident they could trust the other. The thranx had more experience than they wished with duplicitous, deceitful intelligences, among whom the AAnn stood foremost. Sure, these soft-skinned mammals seemed sociable enough, but what if it were all a ruse, a ploy, an attempt to lull the hives into a fatal relaxation of their guard? No one wanted to see another Paszex happen on Hivehom, or anywhere else.
Among the humans there existed an equal if not greater number of concerns. With insects constituting a hereditary racial antagonist, the idea of becoming close friends with their giant, albeit distant alien cousins, the thranx, was difficult for many to stomach. Objections and concerns emerged less often intellectually than they did viscerally.
So each species continued to feel the other out, to study and to learn, and as they did so to keep a wary eye on the activities of the AAnn as well as the other known intelligences. The covert complex north of Geswixt was an attempt by the thranx to broaden and accelerate those contacts.
Though he experienced a delicious shudder of instinctive revulsion every time he called forth in his cubicle a three-dimensional projection of a human, Desvendapur relieved the nausea by composing a new set of sonnets, complete with appropriate accompanying choreography. These files he encrypted and secured with great care lest someone stumble upon them accidentally and wonder at the extraordinary aesthetic skills of a simple food preparator. The lines he devised were facile, the inventions clever, but they lacked the fire he sought. Where was the explosion of brilliance that would gain his work universal recognition? How was he to fabricate lyrical phrases so glorious that they would leave listeners stunned?
In his off hours he threw himself into a study of the humans’ principal language, after first dismissing as a hidden joke the revelation that they still practiced dozens of different tongues. That was an absurd notion, even for creatures as alien as humans. Different dialects could exist, to be sure, but different languages? Dozens of them? How could a civilization arise out of such a counterproductive babble? Deciding that the first linguists to make contact
were having a little fun at the expense of those who came after, he ignored the assertion as he concentrated on the language of contact.
Recordings of their speech yielded a brutal, guttural mode of communication that made Low Thranx sound like a clear stream running over water-polished stones. It was not unpronounceable, but it was unwieldy. And where were the whistles and clicks that gave civilized speech so much of its color and variety? Not to mention the modulated stridulations that humans seemed utterly incapable of duplicating. Though it was difficult to countenance, the records indicated that some human linguists had succeeded in mastering portions of both High and Low Thranx. Furthermore, they had the ability, like the AAnn, to take in air through their mouths instead of through designated, specialized breathing orifices as did the thranx and others. Like the AAnn, their air intakes were located on their faces, resulting in a severe crowding of important sensory organs in the same place. And there were only two air intakes. The thranx had eight, four on each side of the thorax. Given such a deprived physiological architecture, Des thought it something of a minor miracle that the humans were able to take in enough air to supply their blood with sufficient oxygen.
With no one to practice on, he learned by means of repeating human phrases in the solitude of his cubicle. As he studied, he composed, waiting for the time when blinding inspiration would strike. What would help, what he wished for more than anything else, was to meet an actual alien. He knew their food, or at least the thranx food they could digest. Now he wanted to know them.
He had been at the complex for more than a year, long enough to experience the first feelings of despair, when the opportunity finally came.
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