3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  The next day in class, she talked more about A Canticle for Leibowitz, comparing it to other works that looked at the aftermath of atomic war: Davy, The Postman, Star Man's Son. "This subgenre of science fiction was played out by the end of the twentieth century," she said. "By then it had become plain that such a conflict would not leave the survivors, if there were survivors, in any condition to recover as quickly as earlier writers had imagined."

  Again, the Foitani stirred. Again, Jennifer thought they would say what was in their minds. Again, they did not. She almost asked them straight out. Unfortunately, that seemed to lie in the unpleasant middle ground between foolhardy and suicidal. The Foitani had been willing, even eager to talk before. Why not now, with a topic that really hit them where they lived? Jennifer had no answers. Grumbling to herself, she finished her presentation and stalked out of the lecture hall.

  She went through her other two classes on automatic pilot. Still on automatic pilot, she started back toward her own apartment. After a couple of hundred meters, she muttered, "Idiot!" under her breath and turned toward Ella's building. After another fifty meters, she said, "Idiot!" again, much louder this time. A student close enough to hear gave her a curious look. Her cheeks flamed. That seemed only to interest the student more—he was a young man. Jennifer spun away and tramped with grimly determined stride back to her office.

  It wasn't the ideal place to spend a night. The "couch of sorts" was considerably more disreputable—and shorter—than the one in Ella's apartment. But the rest room was only a couple of doors down the hall. For one night, it would do. Tomorrow, Jennifer thought, I'll be in my own new apartment. That made the idea of one uncomfortable evening—even the thought of a dinner at the university cafeteria—bearable.

  The dinner turned out to be bearable, too. Jennifer's best guess was that the university food service would soon fire whoever was responsible for cooking something edible. She took her Coke—what else, she said to herself, would a professor of Middle English drink?—out into the evening twilight and walked across campus slurping on it.

  Once back in her office, she dutifully set to work. No one yet had come up with a computer program for grading essays. She scribbled marginal comments in red ink. At least Spanglish orthography corresponded to sound; she didn't have to deal with the erratic spelling that had plagued Ancient and Middle English.

  Twilight faded to darkness around her. At just after 2100, a security guard phoned. "Sorry, Professor Logan," he said when he saw her face. "Just checking—the IR telltale showed somebody was in there. As long as it's you, there's no problem."

  "I'm so glad," she said, but he had already switched off.

  She tried to recover her train of thought. This student actually showed some grasp of how Piper had put together his future history, and she wanted to make sure she cleared up the gaps in the girl's understanding.

  Just when she had reimmersed herself in the essay, the phone chimed again. This time, it was Ali Bakhtiar. "What do you want?" Jennifer said coldly.

  Bakhtiar flushed. "I want to apologize again," he said. "I've just met your Foitani, and they're at least as impressive as you said they were. At least." He looked more than a little shaken. He didn't look shaken very often.

  "Wait a minute. You met them? How did you meet them?"

  "They came over here looking for you. They said they wanted to talk with you about the class. They didn't seem much interested in taking no for an answer, if you know what I mean. Finally I convinced them you'd moved out. I sent them on to your friend with the deep voice—Ellen Metchnikova, is that right?"

  "Ella," Jennifer corrected absently. "Oh, God. She's not going to be very happy to see them. She has company tonight."

  "I gathered that," Bakhtiar said. "I called her place to warn you they were coming, and she didn't much want to talk. She kept the vision blank, too. She snapped out where you were and switched off. So now you know."

  "Oh, God," Jennifer said again. Ella would be a long time forgiving her for this, if she ever did. "Thanks, Ali, I guess. Better to know they're on the way."

  "Listen, is there any way you could forget about moving out and come back here?" Bakhtiar said. "I really am sorry about what I said before, and I—"

  "No, Ali," Jennifer said firmly. She'd already done all the thinking she needed to do about that one. "I'm sorry, too, but I don't think we were going anywhere anyhow. Just as well to break it off now. I hope we can still be friends, but that's it."

  Bakhtiar scowled. "I hate when women say that. Anyway, though, I thought you ought to know about these creatures of yours. Good luck with them."

  "They're not my creatures," Jennifer said, but Bakhtiar, like the security guard, didn't wait on the line to give her the last word. Shaking her head, she stared down at the essay on Piper. "Where was I?"

  Just when she thought she remembered, the phone chimed again. She muttered something under her breath and jabbed a thumb at the accept button. The vision screen did not light. Ella, she thought, and Ella it was. "Jennifer, three blue behemoths are on their way to visit you."

  "Thanks, Ella. Ali just phoned to warn me he'd sent them to your place. I'm sorry about that," Jennifer added.

  "You ought to be," Ella snapped. "I don't like being interrupted when I'm right on the edge, and I especially don't like being interrupted twice."

  "Oh, dear." Jennifer swallowed a giggle.

  "If you weren't my friend . . . Well, these Foi-whatevers look big enough to have you for breakfast instead of talking, if that's what they want. Maybe you should keep your door locked after all."

  "Don't be silly, Ella. Go back to Xavier, and I hope nobody interrupts you any more."

  "Better not," Ella said darkly. "Good-bye." As it was the first one she'd got in three calls, Jennifer cherished that good-bye. She went back to work on the essay, hoping to finish grading it before the Foitani arrived.

  A few minutes later, the elevator down the hall beeped. The Foitani, Jennifer thought. She put aside the paper; maybe it was never going to get finished. As it went back onto the pile, her brows came together. To get into the building this late, you were supposed to have an authorization card for the elevator to read. Then she shrugged. Maybe the Foitani had ridden up with someone who had a card. They knew her name, after all; a little explaining would be all they'd need.

  Someone knocked on the door—knocked so high up on the door that it could only have been a battleball centerliner or a Foitan. She hadn't heard footsteps in the hall, but then the Foitani didn't wear shoes. They were very smooth and quiet for beings so large, as if they were closer to their hunting ancestors than humans were.

  Jennifer opened the door and looked up and up. Thegun Thegun Nug towered over her; behind him stood the other two Foitani. Close up, they really were intimidating. Without intending to, she took half a step back before she said, "Hello. What can I do for you this evening?"

  "You can come with us," Thegun Thegun Nug said.

  The flat tone of his translator made Jennifer unsure just how he meant that. "I'd sooner talk here," she answered.

  "It was not a conditional request," Thegun Thegun Nug said. Only then did she notice he held something in his left hand; anthropocentrism made her automatically look toward the right first.

  The something sparked. That was all Jennifer remembered for a long time.

  * * *

  When she woke up, she was on a starship. The realization filtered in little by little, with her returning consciousness. Perhaps it took longer than it should have, for she had a headache like a thousand years of hangovers boiled down into a liter. Her trading stunner would quietly put a person out for an hour or two and leave her feeling fine when she woke up. Whatever the Foitani used didn't work that way. Oh my, no. The first time she tried to sit up, her head felt as if it would fall off. She rather wished it would, so she could forget it for a while.

  After a bit, she began to notice things other than her pounding skull. The gravity was a good deal h
igher than Saugus's comfortable .85. It wasn't a planet's g-field, either. She didn't know how she knew the difference—no star traveler had ever succeeded in putting it into words—but she knew. The air was more than conditioned; it had the perfect flatness a good recycling plant gives.

  Everything pointed to its being a Foitani ship, too. The chamber that held her was bigger and had a higher ceiling than humans were likely to build. Even the plain, foam pad on which she lay was outsized. The light from the ceiling panel had an oranger cast than humans would have used.

  She looked around; she had to close her eyes several times at the pain that turning her head cost her. But for the bare mattress, the only things in the chamber with her were three plastic trash bags. She crawled over to them, moving slowly and carefully because of both the higher gravity and her headache. The trash bags held everything she'd had at her office, from her toothbrush to her computer to the complete contents of her desk, right down to paper clips and small change.

  With a gasp of delight, she found her stunner. The delight quickly disappeared. Given that she was on a Foitani ship which she had no idea how to fly, how much good was the stunner likely to do her? She would have traded it in an instant for a year's supply of tampons. Since no one appeared with the trade offer, she clipped the stunner onto her belt.

  Then she looked around for a place to relieve herself. Somehow, no one in her Middle English novels ever worried much about that. Neither had she, until she went on her first trading run. Squatting in the bushes brought her down to basic reality in a hurry.

  She picked the corner farthest away from the foam-rubber mat. If the Foitani didn't come in and give her somewhere better to go before she had to empty her bladder, they could clean up after her themselves.

  She was uncomfortable but not yet urgent when a door appeared in the far wall of her chamber: one second it wasn't there, the next second it was. Thegun Thegun Nug stepped inside. Of itself, her hand reached for her stunner. "That will do you no good," the Foitan said.

  Suddenly she wasn't so sure. Maybe she couldn't fly this ship herself, but if she knocked Thegun Thegun Nug out and threatened to start carving him into strips a centimeter wide, his henchbeings might be persuaded to turn around and take her back to Saugus. Since that was the best notion she had, she pressed the trigger button.

  Thegun Thegun Nug bared his teeth, but uncooperatively refused to fall over in a large, blue heap. "I said that would do you no good," he told her. "Your weapon makes me itch, but it does not make me sleep. Foitani stunners use a different ray."

  Jennifer's gonging head gave anguished testimony to the truth of that. Back to her next priority, then. "Take me to whatever you people use for a toilet."

  Thegun Thegun Nug took her. He even walked out of the room and left her alone. "My folk do not require privacy for this function, but we have learned humans prefer it." The door in the wall did not disappear, though.

  "Thank you so much," Jennifer said, acid in her voice. "Why couldn't you have left me with my privacy back on Saugus, instead of kidnapping me?"

  Her sarcasm rolled off Thegun Thegun Nug's blue skin. Through the opening in the wall, he answered, "You are welcome. And you would not have come with us of your own free will from the world you call Saugus; you were content there. But we have need of you, have need of your knowledge. Thus we took you."

  "Thanks a lot," Jennifer muttered. The sanitary arrangements were simple enough: a couple of round holes in the floor, each close to half a meter wide. She squatted over one of them. When she was done, she called Thegun Thegun Nug, "Do you have anything I can use to wipe myself clean? Something soft and absorbent, I hope."

  "I will see," the Foitan answered after a moment. "My species' orifices do not have this difficulty." Now the doorway vanished. The Foitan stayed away for a quarter of an hour. When he returned, he brought a length of gauzy cloth. "This is from our first-aid kit. Use it sparingly. It is all we can afford to give you."

  "How long will the flight be?" she asked. Thegun Thegun Nug did not answer. She tried another string of questions. "What do you mean, you have need of my knowledge? How do you know what I know? And what kind of good is the knowledge of a professor of Middle English to you, anyhow?"

  Thegun Thegun Nug chose to respond to one of those questions. "You were recommended to us by another human."

  That only created more confusion for Jennifer. "I was? By whom?"

  "By one with whom we have worked. He came across a situation beyond his expertise, and suggested you were the one to employ. From all we have seen of you, the probability that he is correct seems, if not high, then at least significant. He will also give you such aid as he may: he is still within Odern space."

  "Odern?" The translator had left the word unchanged.

  "Odern is my planet," Thegun Thegun Nug said. "It is one of the 127 worlds within our former sphere that still support Foitani life, one of the nineteen where starflight has been rediscovered. Before the Suicide Wars," he added, "we had settled on several thousand worlds; the precise number is still a matter of dispute among our scholars."

  Jennifer shivered. She tried to imagine how humanity would war with ninety-five percent of its planets swept clean of life. She also wondered what the Foitani had found important enough to fight about on such an enormous scale. Humans had battled over religion with similar ferocity, but the rise of technology had weakened religion's hold on mankind. Maybe the Foitani had kept their fanaticism after they reached the stars.

  Thegun Thegun Nug said, "Analysis of our rations has shown that you may safely eat them. You need have no concern on that score."

  "How nice." Jennifer set hands on hips, took a deep breath. "You haven't given me a single reason why I should have the least bit of interest in doing anything for you. And I tell you this: kidnapping me like this has given me an awfully big reason not to."

  "You have been on our payroll since the day we enrolled in your class, honored professor," Thegun Thegun Nug said. "We will pay standard journeyman merchant's wages, either in your currency or trade goods—your choice."

  "I wasn't talking about money," Jennifer said. "And you have gall, too, putting me on your payroll for something I have less than no interest in doing."

  For the first time outside the lecture hall, she succeeded in impressing the Foitan. "Money is not a sufficient inducement?" he said slowly. "I had been given to understand—and nothing I observed on Saugus diminished my understanding—that humans are a mercenary species, willing even, at times, to take arms against their own race or kin-group for the sake of profit."

  "Some humans are. This human isn't. Damn you!" Jennifer heard her voice breaking, but could not do anything about it. "I was doing what I wanted to do, at last, after years of not being able to. What right do you have to take me away from that?"

  "The right of species self-interest," Thegun Thegun Nug said, "which to us is paramount. I might also point out that, at need, physical coercion is available to force you to our will."

  Jennifer's stomach turned to a small, chilly lump of ice. She felt her knees wobble. She was sure, though, that the more weakness she revealed to this inexorable alien, the worse off she would be. She looked up into the Foitan's round, black eyes. "How well do you think I'd do for you if you tortured me into submitting?"

  "Less well than if you cooperate voluntarily, I admit. Torture, certainly, would be a last resort. I am, however, perfectly prepared to take away from you all your possessions and leave you alone in your chamber until ennui induces you to evince a more constructive attitude. My race has been waiting for twenty-eight thousand years. A fraction of another matters little to us."

  She had no doubt Thegun Thegun Nug meant exactly what he said. Being bored into cooperation was attractive only in comparison to being tortured. The worst of it was, the trader part of her wanted to go along with the Foitan. No, the traitor part, she thought. But how many merchants had won the chance to trade with the Foitani? If she looked at it the right way
—the wrong way, the professorial part of her insisted—that was what she'd be doing, trading her knowledge for their goods, if she did know what the aliens thought she knew. If she couldn't skin them on that deal, she didn't deserve to be a journeyman.

  "All right," she said. "If you think I'm worth risking an interstellar war to get, I'll do what I can for you—provided you let me go after I'm done."

  "Certainly," Thegun Thegun Nug said at once. "As for risking war with humans, I will only say it is highly unsafe for ships flown by other species to enter Foitani space unescorted. It is not altogether safe for our own ships to fly. Many weapons from the Suicide Wars are in free orbit throughout our former domain, and hard vacuum is an excellent preservative."

  "Wonderful," Jennifer muttered. Now all she had to do was worry about hitting a mine that had been floating free since the days when Cro-Magnon man chased woolly mammoths between glaciers back on Earth.

  "It is not wonderful, but it is a fact," Thegun Thegun Nug said; none of the three Foitani had much of a sense of humor. "Our detectors should suffice to get us back to Odern, however."

  "They'd better," Jennifer said. "If we blow up, I'll never forgive you."

  Thegun Thegun Nug started to answer, then stopped and seemed to think better of it. At last he said, "Come. I will return you to your chamber."

  "What happens the next time I need to relieve myself?"

  "One of us will escort you here. Were our situations reversed, would you trust me unescorted on a human ship?"

  Jennifer wanted to say she wouldn't trust the Foitan no matter what. That did not seem politic at the moment, regardless of how true it was. Without a word, she followed Thegun Thegun Nug out of the toilet chamber and back to her own. She thought hard about annoying her captors with toilet calls at every hour of the day and night. With some species, she might have tried it. Her best guess, though, was that the Foitani would simply stop coming after a while, leaving her to foul her chamber. She decided not to risk it.