Landing on both feet and stumbling only slightly, the musician assumed a stance preparatory to throwing a choke hold. “The veins in your throat will grow stiff as the branches of a Samum, your blood will become as water.…”
He stopped as he watched blood run down his opponent’s arm. Looks-at-Charts adopted a defensive posture even as he quickly raised a scarf to try and hide the wound. He was too late. High-red-Chanter had seen the blood. His expression tensed, lips held firmly shut over clenched teeth, then assumed a submissive position: head bowed, ears front and down, elbows out, and all fourteen fingers interlocked to show contrition. He was barely able to control the anger in his voice.
“I have drawn blood and broken flesh. I stand ashamed before you.” He knelt on one knee, resting his backside on the protruding heel of a long foot. “Defeat comes to me like a bad dream in the night.”
Having won, Looks-at-Charts felt terrible. “I rain apologies on you for this accident.” Because of the embarrassment he knew that High-red-Chanter would be impossible to interact with for days to come.
Looks-at-Charts’s apology would only make it worse for the musician, but there was no other way to handle it. His clumsiness had cost him and he would have to live with that.
“This is not over,” High-red-Chanter mumbled. “I will challenge you for her again.”
“It was nothing of importance. You magnify everything. And you were winning. I wish it could have been otherwise.”
“No, the miss was mine, as was the challenge.” The musician rose, having held the submissive position just long enough. He was unable to meet his opponent’s gaze. “I was not skilled in that maneuver and should not have tried it. I let my ambition and anger get the better of me. That will not happen again.”
“Yes, another time things may go differently.” While Looks-at-Charts’s voice was full of sympathy, his stance indicated his true feelings.
“It is thoughtful of you to say so.” Anger burning within, High-red-Chanter spun and stomped off into the recreation area.
Looks-at-Charts waited until his rival had been swallowed by the crowd, then resumed his walk forward. It was fortunate that the musician had drawn blood because on the verbal level, at least, he had been winning handily.
Hundreds of years ago there would have been no attempt to score status with a near miss, a passing strike. Then each blow would have landed and more than blood would have been drawn. Eyes would have been gouged, genitals crushed, bones broken. That was the old way of the Quozl, the way of the ancients. The way depicted in so much Quozl art. It had been the only way of coping with the phenomenal Quozl fecundity. Nature had tried disease and famine but in the end it was the Quozl themselves who were the only ones able to limit their population. They had chosen war. Centuries of it.
Then had come artificial methods of birth control, and the Books of the Samizene to show the Quozl a new way, and the teachings of Over-be-Around and the great philosophers.
You could still fight, but combat became a ritualized art form instead of organized murder. You won by almost disabling, almost killing, almost cutting. To actually make contact more than fur-deep was to lose, both in status and in the fight itself. Hence High-red-Chanter’s embarrassment at having drawn blood.
A poor fighter might try to win by deliberately courting contact, but a skilled opponent could always dodge and adjust. Fighting became a matter of control. It was necessary therapy for the calmest Quozl. One could draw solace from the violence that flowed through most Quozl art. All the old, dangerous, primitive tendencies had been subliminated. What could be studied did not have to be acted out, what could be seen did not have to be repeated.
Such fight-dancing was frequent. Had it been otherwise the ship’s psychologists would have become concerned.
One simultaneously fought with words. That had been High-red-Chanter’s strength and Looks-at-Charts’s weakness. He had fought back as best he could, however, confident that the emotional musician would eventually make a mistake. Which was exactly what had happened.
Be not too proud, he told himself. His special training had stood him in good stead, but he had not received it to gain status among his peers. Fill a pouch too full and it will burst. He had learned more control than most Quozl because one day he might have to demonstrate that control under unimaginable circumstances.
He turned up the corridor that would eventually lead him back to his room, wondering whether to look for a coupling or simply some rest. The two techs from Agriculture had given him good and he wouldn’t be ready to go again until he’d had something to eat. Proof arrived in the shape of an attractive colonial with black fur and yellow eyes whom he deliberately avoided. Fuel first. The fight had taken a lot out of him.
He considered watching a viewplay, perhaps an amusement or something similar requiring little mental effort. He could study the Samizene or simply sleep awhile. As a scout there was little for him to do except study.
Soon it would be different, he told himself. It was all but assured. What was hard to do was to maintain the proper air of indifference, to show control when sheer anticipation threatened to put you in the infirmary from exhaustion.
He was quite at peace with himself as he entered his residence, though he still felt some regret at the manner in which High-red-Chanter had lost the fight. Sprawling on the bed-lounge he idly called up recent work on his viewer. They were too familiar to him by now to hold his interest. He’d memorized them years ago: theoretical geography, adaptive botany, field survival, and basic surveying, all information based on facts provided by the citizens of the three worlds the Quozl had first settled. Many settlement ships had been sent out since, but thus far only the inhabitants of Azel, Mazna, and Moszine had progressed far enough to build ships capable of making the return journey to Quozlene.
As he scanned the statistics he was as amazed as ever at the variations that could exist within a single star system. A scout had to be ready to deal with all of them in addition to the unexpected. Three worlds plus Quozlene itself did not seem sufficient background to draw upon. There would be surprises. There could not be too much preparation. He and his colleagues Flies-by-Tail and Breeds-cloud-Out had committed everything available to memory.
The device could also synthesize scenarios by extrapolating upon known facts. For example, it could assume slightly less oxygen and more methane in an atmosphere and postulate the resultant vegetation accordingly. Such syntheses were amusing but insufficient. A mockup by its very nature must ignore certain important factors.
Such ignorance caused Looks-at-Charts to feel the weight of responsibility more than ever. It was going to be up to him and his associates to help decide where the Sequencer should land, where the colony would try to establish itself on the new world. Someone had to be first. Not that he wanted it any other way. In temperament and intelligence he was perfectly suited to the task he’d chosen and for which he’d studied so hard. His whole life had been aimed toward the moment that was fast approaching.
Stares-down-Canyons had died a cycle ago without having the chance to fulfill his dream. He had been fifth generation and Looks-at-Charts’s mentor, drilling him in his studies while knowing all the while that unless the original calculations proved wrong he would never set foot on the new world, never have the chance to exercise the skills he had mastered. His patience and good humor had made the impossible seem attainable to the young Looks.
Stares should be here, Looks-at-Charts thought sadly. Not I. He recited several phrases from the Fifth Book which dealt with feelings of inadequacy and immediately felt better.
Landscapes and climates flashed across the viewer box, mirrored in his eyes. Bored, he switched to information on Mazna, always more interesting than statistics from Azel or Moszine because unlike them, Mazna had turned out to harbor hostile lifeforms. The first two colonies had been established with comparative ease. In contrast, Mazna had been a fight.
Details were so few, he mused in frustration. By n
ow there must be dozens of other Quozl colonies scattered across the firmament, but none save the first three had advanced enough to return a vessel to Quozlene with helpful information. For all he knew, half a dozen such ships had arrived home subsequent to the Sequencer’s departure. Any one of them might hold the solution to a forthcoming problem. It was a solution he would never see. Communication between worlds traveled no faster than a settlement ship itself, though here were always stories and rumors of new scientific developments. It was intolerable.
Useless it was, and stressful, to sulk over such things. For all practical purposes Quozlene, Azel, and the rest did not exist. Nothing existed except the Sequencer and those aboard her. The ship was a ponderous giant, a slowly moving island of intelligence and life making its way through a dumb, ferocious cosmos. Isolation was their pouch, not Quozlene. Not for the past six generations. Sometime in the far future his great-great-great-offspring might succeed in building a ship to return with news of the colony’s success, but he would not know of it, nor would any of his contemporaries.
More out of frustration than need he shifted the viewer from the education lines to the primary entertainment line. He found himself watching a depiction of the epic Fourth Dynastic War which pitted the Northern and Eastern United Clans of ancient Quozlene against the Southern. The depiction required days of nonstop viewing and he had yet to watch it all the way through. It was full of the kind of sweep and spectacle which entralled the colonists who had been born on the ship, and which for thousands of cycles had made Quozlene a living hell.
Within a short time he had witnessed less than half a dozen disembowelings and as many beheadings, interspersed with scenes of ritual torture and dismemberment, but he was not disappointed. Even in an epic some time had to be reserved for necessary explication. Some of the performers were legends or so the accompanying history of the making of the epic insisted. They were dead now, but their images lived and breathed and drifted within the depths of the viewer. They had achieved electronic immortality.
He found himself nodding off, the curved sides of his bed-lounge enclosing him pouchlike, the false wood walls arching overhead and the viewer humming softly high above his feet as it disgorged shrunken depictions of ancient massacres.
His mind’s eye was filled with dreams of the new world. In them he was the first to stand on its rich soil, to survey a paradise compared to which Azel was a desert. A second Quozl stood beside him, sleek of fur and bright of eye, the most beautiful he’d ever seen. They coupled repeatedly while his communicator frantically asked for details.
Though he was not yet of age and had yet to qualify according to the standards set for procreation, he dreamed also of siring offspring, of fulfilling the central Quozl purpose of replication, of watching youngsters moving inside their mothers’ pouches. Soon it would no longer be a fantasy. With a whole new world to fill, the chemical inhibitors everyone ingested in their daily meals would be removed and impregnation could commence unrestrained.
Unless their new home turned out to be another Mazna, hostile and threatening. In that case he, Looks-at-Charts, would show the way, beating back the flora and fauna until the colony was safely established. Nothing could stop him, nothing could hold him back.
They would raise a memorial to him. His offspring and his children’s offspring would do him homage as the first to set foot on the new world. Looks-at-Charts the Great. Looks-at-Charts the Honored. Looks-at-Charts the Unsurpassed.
They would admire him as one whose taste was unequaled.
He could hear the acclaim, feel the roar of adulation wash over him, and he accepted it as his due even though he knew he couldn’t really be hearing it because he was asleep, asleep and then he wasn’t and it wasn’t the whistling from thousands of throats that brought him awake but rather the insistent whine of his viewer.
Absent the epic and in its place a disapproving face staring back at him. Tell-no-Fury was addressing him in appropriately honorific terms, but he was not wasting time. That befitted the senior member of the Landing Preparation staff. Looks-at-Charts blinked double lids and sat up fast, his future glory a rapidly fading memory.
“I am terribly sorry to have interrupted your rest. Please forgive me,” said Tell-no-Fury. Looks-at-Charts was properly ashamed for not having been available to respond. Technically he was on duty.
“It was unforgiveable and I can’t find a proper excuse.”
“There is no need for excuses.” What Tell-no-Fury was actually saying was that he was good and mad but that he didn’t have the time to waste on bawling the young scout out because he had something more important on his mind. As if this wasn’t sufficiently apparent in his tone, both ears were turned down and forward.
“The meeting,” he explained quietly.
Meeting.… Looks-at-Charts checked his chronometer and his eyes squeezed shut in shock. The meeting. His encounter with High-red-Chanter had caused him to forget. No wonder Tell-no-Fury was so upset!
“It is about to commence,” the staff senior said dryly. “It will commence with or without you, but having noticed your absence I felt it incumbent upon me to ascertain the state of your health and to inquire if I might be of some assistance in the event you proved unwell.”
“A thousand thousand apologies for my inexcusable tardiness!” It was the best Looks-at-Charts could manage under the circumstances. In this instance eloquence would be an unavoidable casualty. He would try to make up for it later. “I’ll be there before your viewer cools.”
He did not so much leave as flee his bed, forgetting even to shut his own viewer down. That would cost him later but presently he was only concerned with now. He ripped off his jumpsuit, got the armholes of his dress jumper on backward, cursed as he straightened them out, and adjusted his fur beneath the elastic. Then he closed his eyes and tried to calm himself, repeating the requisite phrases over and over in a soft murmur. When that didn’t work he approached the foam figure of a Quozl in full ancient battle dress which stood near the doorway and struck it several times in the three vital areas. Feeling much better, he hurried out into the corridor.
II.
NO RELAXING PACE this time, no casual stroll through the recreation area. He commandeered the first empty intraship transport vehicle he encountered and snapped directions. Leaning back and propping his feet on the rest bar, he straightened his ears as the wheeled capsule accelerated. The vehicle resembled an infirmary pill and moved through the ship’s guts almost as fast, traveling through the narrow transport tunnel. He emerged close to piloting and guidance, having traveled from near the Sequencer’s midsection to a point close to its bow.
Ignoring the warning from the vehicle, he jumped out before it had come to a complete stop and tried to run without appearing hasty. His ears were burning but not from the machine’s admonition.
How could he have slept through part of the meeting? There was no time to check insignia, brush his fur, or check his shaved patches, no time even to use a grooming razor.
As he neared the meeting chamber he slowed, wondering who would be present and who would not. Tell-no-Fury perhaps, Flies-by-Tail certainly among those he considered friends. The doors recognized him and parted to permit entrance, the fluorescent lines simulating the grain of Orkil wood pulsing brightly.
There was no mistaking the importance of the meeting. Stream-cuts-Through sat on the highest row, surrounded by her officers. The Captain looked tired, but then that seemed to be her natural state of being lately. Around the ribbed triangle shaved into her forehead gray was beginning to appear prominently. Stream-cuts-Through was fourth generation and something of a legend in her own time. It was rumored that in her younger years she had been noted for her readiness to interrupt the most intense coupling in order to deal with any problem involving the ship.
Eye-bends-Left sat next to her on the high table. There were four tiers in all, arcs facing the main viewscreen, and most but not all the chairs were occupied. Eye was the Sequencer’s Na
vigator, or more properly, the individual who monitored and took care of the computer which navigated the settlement ship. The presence of both Captain and Navigator suggested that this might be the meeting their lives had been pointing toward. It was no great surprise. The timetable was as much a part of everyone’s life as eating and coupling.
And he’d almost slept through it.
Tell-no-Fury was not present, he saw as his gaze swept the ranked rows. All of his colleagues and most of his other superiors were, some forty in all. The youngest sat on the bottom row, their elders above according to age. All were freshly groomed. Scarves were twisted just so, earrings polished and gleaming. As he entered quickly he wished he could hide behind his own feet, which for a Quozl was not a physical impossibility.
A few faces turned in his direction, rapidly and politely looked away. Only Nose-sees-Carefully acknowledged his arrival, half raising her right ear in salutation. If observed by one of the Elders higher up the gesture would draw her a protocolic reprimand. Looks was grateful for the gesture and responded. They had never coupled and neither found the other particularly attractive, but they would have to find each other soon. Coupling to ensure compatibility was essential to any successful mutual enterprise, and they might find themselves working together.
Several of the Seniors were still taking their seats which meant that the meeting had not officially begun. Tell-no-Fury had warned him just in time. Stream-cuts-Through rose as he stumbled to his seat, trying to make himself as small as possible. Nose-sees-Carefully sat seven seats away from him, one row up. She did not look in his direction. He resolved to couple with her as soon as practical. Her gesture might have drawn the attention of disapproving Elders away from his ignoble entrance.
Had he arrived two moments later his disgrace would have been unavoidable. But if this was the meeting he was certain his tardiness would be overlooked.
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