3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  Aissur Aissur Rus brought her a plastic pouch of food a couple of hours later. She looked at it without enthusiasm. It resembled nothing so much as dry dog food. "This will nourish you, and should cause no allergic responses," the Foitan said.

  Of the three aliens, Jennifer thought Aissur Aissur Rus the most open. Hoping he would answer where Thegun Thegun Nug had not, she asked, "Why did you people grab me? What do you think I can do for you, anyhow?"

  "As a matter of fact, taking you was my idea," he said.

  She stared at him. After liking him the best, hearing that jolted her. "What is it you want from me?" she repeated.

  "One of your human sages once said, 'I am a midget, standing on the shoulders of giants.' When we Foitani of the present days look at the deeds of the Great Ones before the Suicide Wars, we are midgets trying to see up to the shoulders of giants. Perhaps you can help us do that. If not, perhaps you can help us see around the giants' bodies to a new way."

  Jennifer frowned. Thegun Thegun Nug had evaded her questions. Aissur Aissur Rus seemed to answer openly enough, but the answer did not mean anything to her. "Go away and let me eat," she told him.

  "I did not know you required privacy for that," he said.

  "I don't require it, but I'd be grateful. I have a whole lot of things I need to sort out in my mind right now. Please."

  Aissur Aissur Rus studied her. The Foitan's eyes had no sclera, no iris, no pupil. They were completely black and completely unreadable. At last, without a word, he made the doorway appear in her wall, walked through it, and made it disappear after him.

  She ate. The coarse, crunchy lumps in the plastic pouch tasted like what she thought dog food ought to taste like; they came from something that had been meat quite a while ago. She made herself go on eating till she was full.

  When she was done, she looked up at the ceiling and said, "I would like something to drink, please." The Foitani had to have electronic eyes and ears in the chamber.

  Sure enough, Aissur Aissur Rus brought her a jug a few minutes later. "This is pure water," he said. "You may drink it safely."

  "Thank you," Jennifer said. "May I also have water for washing?"

  "Perhaps when you go to the toilets, so it will run down into a disposal hole," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "How often do you usually wash? The human custom is once a day, is it not? I suppose that might be arranged."

  "You might have thought beforehand about what I'd need," Jennifer said.

  "We are not used to considering the needs of other species. It is not the Foitani way, and does not come easy to us."

  "Really? I never would have noticed."

  Irony bounced off Aissur Aissur Rus as if he were iron-plated. When he saw Jennifer had no more to say, he turned and left as abruptly as he had before. She drank the jug dry. The water was cold, and had the faint, unpleasant untaste of distilling. It did help to ease her headache.

  The jug was made of soft plastic. She flung it against the wall nonetheless. It denied her the good satisfying crash she craved, falling to the ground with a dull thump. She walked over to it and kicked it as hard as she could. That helped, but not enough. She found a pen, drew a couple of black circles on the side of the jug to stand for Foitani eyes. She kicked it again. "Better," she said.

  V

  Jennifer's computer insisted the flight to Odern lasted twenty-three days and some hours after the aliens snatched her away from Saugus. She thought it felt more like twenty-three years. By the time the ship landed, she wished all the Foitani had succeeded in blasting themselves to hell and gone—and then another twenty kilometers farther, for luck.

  For one thing, her period arrived while she was in space, with no possibility of privacy whatever. She didn't much feel like explaining to the aliens how her plumbing worked, but she didn't have much choice, either, not if she wanted to keep her clothes clean. This time, they gave her all the absorbent cloth she wanted without arguing; menstruation, evidently, was one aspect of humanity about which they hadn't informed themselves.

  "You wanted me, you got me—just the way I am," she told Thegun Thegun Nug.

  "As you say." The Foitan hesitated. "You are certain you are not wounded?"

  "I'm certain."

  "As you say," Thegun Thegun Nug repeated. Though his translator sounded flat as ever, he did not seem convinced. Squeamish, are you? Jennifer wondered. She wished she could break out in green, smelly spots, just to revolt him.

  For another, she got thoroughly sick of kibbles and water as a standard diet. "You knew you were going to kidnap me," she snarled at Dargnil Dargnil Lin. "Why didn't you buy—or even steal—something edible for me?"

  "These rations are both edible and nutritious," Dargnil Dargnil Lin answered primly. "They are adapted for human needs from our standard spacecraft fare."

  "You mean you eat this stuff all the time when you're in space?" Jennifer asked. When Dargnil Dargnil Lin waved a hand in front of his face in the Foitani equivalent of a nod, she said, "That's the best argument against spaceflight I ever heard." Dargnil Dargnil Lin left quite suddenly. Maybe, Jennifer thought, I've managed to annoy him for a change. She hoped so.

  The one good thing about the flight was that it met none of the infernal devices left over from the Suicide Wars. Having to go that far to find something good brought the rest of the journey into perfect perspective for Jennifer.

  She did not even know the ship had touched down until all three Foitani appeared outside the disappearing doorway. "Come with us," Thegun Thegun Nug said.

  "How can I say no?" Jennifer murmured. Not only did he have his two immense comrades to help enforce his wishes, he was also carrying that vicious Foitani stunner. Getting shot with it was better than dying, but only a little.

  The Foitani led her in the direction away from the lavatory. That was her first hint something unusual had happened. Any hope she had of seeing more of the ship quickly went by the wayside; one stretch of blank corridor looked just like another. But the chamber they went into had big space suits in a rack to one side; in a human ship, that would have made it the air lock.

  Thegun Thegun Nug touched a panel on the far wall. Another doorway opened. Sunlight poured in. So did fresh air. After more than three weeks of the recycled product, it smelled amazingly sweet. The doorway framed buildings and green hills. The green hills of Odern, Jennifer thought. She shook her head. Rhysling would not have approved.

  Thegun Thegun Nug turned and went backward out the door. Since he didn't fall, Jennifer figured he was going down a ladder. Aissur Aissur Rus followed him. "Now you," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said. "I will come last." Since he also had a stunner, Jennifer did not argue.

  The way down proved not to be a ladder, but rather rungs set into the side of the spacecraft. The rungs were made for people the size of Foitani, which is to say, they were much too far apart for Jennifer. She was enough meters off the concrete below to get nervous at the thought of missing one, which did nothing to improve her grip.

  "Hurry, can't you?" Dargnil Dargnil Lin called from the air lock.

  "No, I can't," she said through clenched teeth. By the time she reached the ground, sweat was pouring from her armpits, too. This was a lot harder than going down the wall on L'Rau. She wanted to stand where she was and catch her breath, but from the way Dargnil Dargnil Lin was descending behind her, he didn't care whether he landed on her or not. She skipped aside in a hurry.

  Once on the ground, Dargnil Dargnil Lin reached up and slapped the side of the ship. The rungs vanished, leaving the side smooth once more. It had to be memory metal, Jennifer thought. On human worlds, the stuff was a toy. The Foitani would appear to have exploited the technology more intensively.

  As soon as the rungs disappeared, her captors seemed to forget all about her. They faced the low, rounded, green hills behind the spaceport, bowed themselves almost double. Still bowed, they began a slow, mumbling chant. Their translators picked up some of it for Jennifer. "Great Ones, look kindly on us. We return to Ode
rn our homeworld, faithful always to our mission to regain the glory you once knew. Though earthgrip holds you now, we shall redeem you. May your glory return speedily, Great Ones, speedily. So may it be."

  "You worship the Foitani who lived before the Suicide Wars?" Jennifer asked when Thegun Thegun Nug and his companions decided to notice her again.

  "Not worship so much as respect," Aissur Aissur Rus said, "and truly the deeds of the Great Ones deserve—no, demand—respect. The more we learn of them, the more we seek to emulate them, to restore our sphere to the grandeur it once knew."

  To bring about the conditions that caused the Suicide Wars, whatever those were, Jennifer glossed mentally, with a slight internal chill. Aloud, she said, "Then you don't really believe the Foitani you call the Great Ones live inside those hills?'"

  "Not now," Aissur Aissur Rus said. Before Jennifer could do more than start to frown, the Foitan went on, "But once they did. Those are not natural hills. Once a city stood there. We've mined it for millennia."

  Jennifer glanced over to the hills once more, this time with fresh eyes. They still looked big enough and permanent enough to have been in place for millions of years. And this was after—how long had Thegun Thegun Nug said?—twenty-eight thousand years, that was it, of neglect and erosion. She tried to imagine the towers that must have existed before earth and plants and time had their way with them, tried and failed.

  "Odern was but a minor world in our former sphere," Aissur Aissur Rus added. "Others have remains far grander and far better preserved. But most of those worlds are dead, of course."

  "Of course," Jennifer echoed softly. That internal chill grew and spread as she thought about what living as the scattered survivors of the galaxy's biggest slaughterhouse had to be like for the Foitani. No wonder they didn't have much of a sense of humor.

  "Now come with us," Thegun Thegun Nug said. "We have reported our success to our kin-group chiefs. They and we will presently acquaint you with the other human in our employ."

  The other human—Jennifer had forgotten about him. Of itself, her hand went to the stunner she still wore on her belt. It was no more than an annoyance to the Foitani, but the first time she saw this other human, she intended to flatten him—and to kick him while he was down, too.

  The spaceport tarmac was full of big, blocky-looking Foitani ships. A couple of kilometers away, almost hidden by one of them, she saw a vessel that had to be human-built. It was the sort of medium-sized, medium-slow ship a trader who worked solo might fly. "He'll be so low, all right, when I'm through with him," she said under her breath.

  Like the ships, the spaceport buildings were on what was to her a heroic scale. Foitani who carried things that looked a lot more lethal than stunners stood outside doorways. They touched their left knees to the ground as Thegun Thegun Nug and his comrades went by. Even from that position of respect, their fathomless black eyes bored into Jennifer. She wondered if she really did prefer these dispassionate stares of suspicion to the longing glances human males so often sent her way. Maybe not, she decided.

  Inside the administrative center or whatever it was, Foitani tramped purposefully down corridors wide and tall enough to echo. Some were armed like the guards outside; others spoke into computers. They all went about their business with the serious intensity that seemed a hallmark of the species.

  Thegun Thegun Nug stood outside a place marked by writing in the angular Foitani script. He spoke to the air. Jennifer did not know what he said; somewhere between the ship and here, he and his fellows had turned off their translators. The air answered, as unintelligibly. Thegun Thegun Nug spoke again. One of those unnerving now-you-see-it, now-you-don't doors opened in front of him.

  Jennifer had never been inside a spaceport operations center, but every third holovid drama seemed set in one, so she had some idea what they were like. This was definitely the Foitani version of such a nerve center. Big blue aliens talked into microphones, listened to oddly shaped headsets that accommodated their erectile ears, and watched holographic displays. For a few seconds, no one paid any attention to Thegun Thegun Nug and his comrades.

  Then a Foitan spotted Jennifer. He waved her captors toward what looked like another blank wall. By now she had learned blank walls didn't necessarily stay blank among the Foitani. Sure enough, this one didn't. A door appeared, this time opening onto what had to be the local equivalent of a boss's office. For one thing, it boasted carpeting, the first Jennifer had seen on Odern. For another, the desk behind which a Foitan stood seemed about as long and wide as the flight deck of an ancient aircraft carrier.

  "You will pay your respects to Pawasar Pawasar Ras." Thegun Thegun Nug turned his translator back on as soon as the office door disappeared behind his party. He pointed to the Foitan behind the desk.

  Jennifer nodded. "Hello, Pawasar Pawasar Ras." If I had a stepladder, I'd spit in your eye.

  "I greet you, human," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said; Jennifer suspected that meant he was too important an executive to be bothered with remembering her name. "I trust your journey here was of adequate comfort."

  You're pretty trusting, then, aren't you? was what she wanted to say. Since the Foitani who had kidnapped her already knew exactly how she felt about that, she kept her mouth shut.

  Dargnil Dargnil Lin nudged her. A nudge from a Foitan was almost enough to knock her off her feet. "Answer the honored kin-group leader when he questions you," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said.

  "I survived the journey," she said. Let this honcho make what he wanted of that.

  Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "You are doubtless of the opinion that you have seen a sufficiency of our kind." Jennifer's eyes opened wide: this was the first Foitan she'd met who had any of what humans reckoned common sense. Maybe it was rare enough in his species to make possessing it an automatic ticket to an important job like his. He went on, "Accordingly, I will let the human who has been working in cooperation with us explain the predicament he and we have encountered."

  He touched something on his desk. A door appeared in a different wall of the office. Jennifer waited grimly. Whoever had set her up for this would have a lot more explaining to do than Pawasar Pawasar Ras thought. He might even find himself in a brand new predicament of his own.

  A man dressed in trader coveralls came through the doorway. Jennifer stared. She'd expected to know the fellow who had betrayed her. She'd never expected he'd be someone she liked. "Bernard!" The academic part of her dredged up a stupid Middle English joke. "What's a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?"

  Bernard Greenberg looked sheepish, although the top of his head was devoid of wool. "Hello, Jennifer," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't think they'd just up and grab you."

  "Well, they bloody well did," she said, then added bitterly, "Were you so angry at me for going off to the university instead of staying a trader that you decided to get even? This isn't even; this is overkill."

  "No, no, no." He plucked at his salt-and-pepper beard in distress. "It's not like that, Jennifer; really it's not. I thought they'd consult you. When they told me they were going to bring you here, I tried as hard as I could to talk them out of it. But their ship had already left for Saugus by then, and even if it hadn't, it's not easy to talk a Foitan out of anything. You may have noticed that."

  "Now that you mention it, yes," she said with a sidelong glance at Thegun Thegun Nug. She studied Bernard Greenberg and decided she'd made a mistake. "I should be the one who says she's sorry, Bernard. It's not your fault—not all your fault, anyway. I just hit out at the first thing I could reach without climbing onto a box." She looked at Thegun Thegun Nug again. His translator was working, but if he caught what she'd meant as well as what she'd said, he gave no sign of it.

  Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "Enough, if you please; this is not an appropriate time or place for social intercourse. Human Bernard, be so good as to define the problem for your colleague here." He knows Bernard's name, Jennifer thought with what she knew to be a completely irrational st
ab of jealousy.

  "If I could define the problem, honored kin-group leader Pawasar Pawasar Ras, I wouldn't need a colleague," Greenberg answered. Pawasar Pawasar Ras bared his teeth. Jennifer knew that was only a Foitani frown, but it carried more impact than anything a human could do. Greenberg turned back to Jennifer. "You know the Foitani are past-worshipers and scavengers both."

  She nodded. "Given what they did to themselves so long ago, it's hardly surprising."

  "No, it isn't. The local population on Odern has mined the planet pretty thoroughly, when you consider how much of what used to be here has to have rusted away or whatever over the past umpty-thousand years."

  Not enough, Jennifer thought. By the way Greenberg's mouth narrowed and lengthened ever so slightly—it wasn't a smile; it wasn't even close to a smile—Jennifer knew he'd picked up what she was thinking. No nonhuman would have noticed a change in his expression. She said, "I'm still not clear what this has to do with me."

  "Scavenging turned into a whole different game for the local Foitani when they reinvented the hyperdrive," Greenberg said. "They had some idea which stars held planets their species had settled once upon a time. When they went out to look at those planets, they found that a lot of them were dead. Some had no Foitani left, some had no life at all—sterile. Fission bombs, diseases, asteroid strikes, poison gas—I don't know what all. The old imperial Foitani—"

  "The Great Ones," Pawasar Pawasar Ras corrected.

  "The Great Ones, I mean—well, they seem to have had a more advanced technology than we do now. They were great at killing, that's certain. And on a lot of those dead worlds, the toys they left behind survived in much better shape than on a place like Odern, where everything got reused over and over again as the world was sliding into barbarism. Now, on one of the planets that used to be part of the empire, they've come across something they can't handle."