3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  The humans in the holovid display—a man and a woman—were a lot grimier than Jennifer had worried about being. They wore furs. The man carried a wooden spear with a stone point attached with sinews. The woman clutched a stone knife, or it might have been a scraper. They both looked scared to death.

  The Great One examined them carefully as he had Jennifer and Greenberg. He even sniffed them in the same way, as if to confirm by another sense that they were of the same type. That puzzled Jennifer. Could a holovid come with a scent attachment? She supposed so, for a race with a sense of smell more sensitive than humanity's. On the other hand—

  "Bernard," she whispered, "do you think those poor cave people could somehow still be alive in here?"

  He started to shake his head, then stopped. "I don't know," he said slowly. "The Foitan sure seems to be. After that, all bets are off."

  Jennifer wondered if the tower was some kind of Foitani museum—or zoo. At first, no doubt because she'd seen the two humans, the idea was horrifying. Then she remembered the notion she'd had the first time she came up to the tower, of countless aliens going in and never coming out. Imagining a museum or zoo was a lot more comfortable than thinking about—what was the Middle English expression? A Final Solution, that was it.

  The Foitan spoke to the air again. The humans it had called up disappeared once more, whether back into data storage or storage of a more literal sort. The Great One gave Jennifer and Greenberg another once-over. He bared his teeth at them in a Foitani frown. "Wondering what we're doing here," Greenberg guessed.

  "I'll bet you're right," Jennifer said. "Earth is a long, long way from Gilver. What are the odds of cave people ending up here on their own and on the loose?" Something else occurred to her. "I wonder if the Foitan knows he's been here twenty-eight thousand years."

  Greenberg hissed. "That's a real good question. I wish I had a real good answer."

  "I wish I did, too."

  The Foitan came out of his study. He walked over to the far wall of the chamber and rapped on it. This time it wasn't a door that opened, only a drawer-sized space. The Great One reached in, pulled something out, pointed it at Jennifer and Greenberg. By the way he handled it, the object was obviously a weapon.

  "Oh, shit," Greenberg said softly. "Whether it's twenty-eight thousand years or day before yesterday, the breed doesn't seem to have changed much some ways, does it? Oh, shit," he repeated.

  Jennifer would have looked for better last words than that. But the Great One seemed to have second thoughts. Instead of firing, he gestured with the weapon. "I'm tired of being ordered around by Foitani," Jennifer said. With very little choice, however, she went down the hall in the direction the Great One indicated.

  After about twenty meters, the Foitan stopped her and Greenberg. Another rap on the wall produced another doorway. The Great One ordered the humans into the new chamber. It reminded Jennifer of nothing so much as the library setup back on Odern: it was full of strange-looking holovid gear and computer equipment. Greenberg found another name for it. "Command post," he said.

  His proved the better guess. The Great One said something. A bank of screens came to life: the view immediately around the tower at ground level. More than one screen showed gray-blue Foitani from Rof Golan pressed up against the side of the building. Some still carried the arms they had brought to Gilver to use against the Foitani from Odern. All of them, armed or not, had the lost-soul look of Foitani under the influence of the Great Unknown.

  The Great One had seemed almost godlike in competence and confidence. Now for the first time Jennifer saw him discomfited. He stared at his Rof Golani umpty-greatgrandscions as if he could not believe, did not want to believe, his eyes. She wondered what the Great One thought of those distorted versions of himself, versions made all the more grotesque by their obvious insanity.

  At a shouted command, the Great One shifted to a view that had to have come from the top of the tower. Far off in the distance, Jennifer saw the spaceport by the research base of the Foitani from Odern. She also saw atmospheric fliers, tiny specks in the screen, diving to attack the base.

  One exploded in midair. The burst of light drew the Great One's notice. The magnification of the pickup increased. Now small-arms flashes were plainly visible. Jennifer tried to figure out what was going on. The Foitani from Odern—her Foitani—seemed to have established a defensive perimeter against their distant cousins from Rof Golan. As she watched, a missile streaked out from the base to blow up a Rof Golani armored vehicle.

  The Great One watched, too—in horror, if Jennifer was any judge. When the Foitan spoke again, alarms started yammering. Alarm ran through Jennifer, as well. Not so long ago, she'd scoffingly suggested to Pawasar Pawasar Ras that the tower might be full of armed Great Ones waiting to get loose. Now she didn't feel like scoffing any more.

  Her own personal Great One didn't wait for any of his hypothetical relatives to arrive. Another wave of his weapon sent Jennifer and Greenberg back down the hall the way they had come. He marched them past the chamber in which they'd found him, all the way to the end of the corridor. An offhand, almost contemptuous rap on the wall produced the doorway Greenberg had found after so much effort. The Great One's weapon ordered the humans back into the room by way of which they'd entered the tower.

  The Great One looked at the outer wall. Jennifer wondered if he saw it smooth and unblemished or if he could tell the hole from the shaped charge was there. Pieces of stone from the explosion still littered the floor. If the Great One saw that wall as being smooth and unblemished, he'd have the devil's own time figuring out how the broken rock got there.

  Several other Great Ones came rushing into the room. They were as like the first one as so many peas in a pod—almost even down to color, Jennifer thought irrelevantly. They were all armed, too, with weapons identical to the one the first old-time Foitan carried. One of them pointed his weapon at the outer wall. Jennifer didn't see him pull a trigger or press a button, but suddenly the hole—or a hole—was visible to her again.

  "Did he make a new opening, or is that the same one Enfram Enfram Marf's charge blasted?" she asked Greenberg.

  "I think it's ours," he answered, his eyes wide. "What does that make the Foitan's gun, though? An illusion-piercer? An illusion-creator?"

  "Whatever it is, I don't want to be on the wrong end of it. If it makes me think I'm dead, I have the bad feeling I'd really end up that way."

  "Me, too." Greenberg reached out to take her hand. She squeezed back. The contact was reassuring. She knew—she thought she knew—it was real.

  A Great One stuck his head through the hole. It was barely wide enough for his shoulders to go through, but he managed to squeeze out. Jennifer wished Pawasar Pawasar Ras hadn't listened to her or to Aissur Aissur Rus. Here were the warriors of a long-forgotten day, free on Gilver once more.

  One of the Great Ones pointed his weapon at Jennifer and Greenberg. He urged them toward the hole they'd made. They went. Greenberg scrambled out first. Jennifer came after him a moment later.

  The Great One goosed her with his weapon to make her go faster. She squawked and almost fell as she popped out of the hole. Greenberg helped steady her, then moved her away from the opening before the next Foitan came through and stepped on her.

  Imperial Foitani kept emerging. Jennifer wondered if the alarm had rung all through the tower, and how many Great Ones had been in suspended animation or whatever they used. She thought again of Pawasar Pawasar Ras's worries and how she'd pooh-poohed them. If she ever got the chance, she'd apologize to the kin-group leader.

  No Foitani from Rof Golan had been within a couple of hundred meters of where the Great Ones were coming out. The gray-blue soldiers, caught in the spell of the Great Unknown, gaped as their green-blue forebears came out of what might have looked to them like solid rock.

  Jennifer waited for the Rof Golani to fell to their knees and worship the returned Great Ones, or to perform some equivalent ritual. The Rof Golani po
inted at the newcomers, shouting among themselves. One of them yelled something toward the revived imperial Foitani. A Great One answered. Without hesitation, the Foitani from Rof Golan began running toward the Foitani who had come out of the tower.

  And, without hesitation, the Great Ones methodically began shooting them down. Most of the Foitani from Rof Golan were too befuddled to use their own weapons, but their bared teeth, outstretched claws, and bellows of fury said what they thought of the Great Ones. But that wholehearted hatred availed them not at all, for the imperial Foitani calmly continued their massacre.

  One Rof Golani somehow kept enough presence of mind to remember he carried a weapon more lethal than those with which he'd been born. Bullets ricocheted from the wall just above the Great Ones' heads. Jennifer and Greenberg threw themselves flat. A moment later, an imperial Foitan killed the only gray-blue soldier who'd seriously tried to fight back.

  Slowly, Jennifer got to her feet. The precinct that contained the Great Unknown seemed to sway around her. Her view of the Foitani was rocking, too. Far from reverencing the Great Ones, the Foitani from Rof Golan had tried to kill them on sight. The Great Ones hadn't wasted any time returning the favor, either, and by all indications so far, they were a lot deadlier than the Rof Golani.

  An old-time Foitan walked over to the nearest Rof Golani corpse and stared down at it. Jennifer wished she were better at reading Foitani facial expressions. Then the Foitan removed all doubt about what he was thinking. As Enfram Enfram Marf had with Jennifer, he drew back his leg for a kick. Unlike Enfram Enfram Marf, he didn't stop himself. He kicked the dead Rof Golani as hard as he could. The body had to weigh something close to two hundred kilos. The kick rolled it over, twice.

  Several other Great Ones abused the bodies of the Foitani from Rof Golan. One picked up the weapon the Rof Golani had managed to fire. He examined it for more than a minute, then threw it aside with unmistakable scorn. His own hand weapon emitted a beam of some sort; but for being dead, the Rof Golani looked fine.

  Off in the western distance, the explosions round the research base of the Foitani from Odern kept rumbling. Fliers clashed above it: Rof Golani attacking, Foitani from Odern defending. A Great One pointed his weapon at one of those fliers. It was more than a dozen kilometers away, but it twisted in midair and crashed to the ground with a flash of purple light.

  The rest of the old-time Foitani began swatting fliers out of the air as easily as if they'd been flies. Jennifer watched in appalled perplexity as the machines tumbled. "What's going on?" she demanded of Bernard Greenberg, who had no more answers than she did. "The Foitani from Odern practically worshiped the ground the Great Ones used to live on. No matter what they said about the Rof Golani, they never said the Rof Golani hated the Great Ones, either. But they do." She looked at the sprawled corpses, shuddered, and looked away. "And the Great Ones hate them, too. Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing—this." She spread her hands in an all-encompassing gesture.

  "Tell me about it," he said. He looked away from the carnage, too. "From what we've seen of the way Foitani treat other races, I'm glad they didn't just shoot us down without asking questions first."

  One of the Great Ones swung his head around to glare at the two humans. By the way he hefted his weapon, he wasn't far from doing what Greenberg had feared. He wrapped a hand around his muzzle so it closed his mouth, pointed first at Jennifer, then at Greenberg. Shut up, she figured out, and obeyed. Greenberg didn't say anything more, either.

  The old-time Foitani—by now a couple of dozen of them might have been outside the tower—spread out into what looked like a skirmish line. One of them pointed west, toward the sound of fighting . . . and toward the research base of the Foitani from Odern. The whole band started moving in that direction.

  By the way they set out, fifteen kilometers was a stroll in the park for them. Jennifer looked longingly toward her sledge. The Foitan who'd warned her to be quiet gestured with his weapon—that way. She sighed and went that way after the Great Ones.

  The old-time Foitani strode along at a pace that suited them fine, which meant it was uncomfortably quick for Jennifer. She kept up anyhow, and so did Greenberg. The Great One who was covering them looked as if he'd happily get rid of them if they slowed him down.

  She looked around behind her, wondering if more imperial Foitani were issuing from the central tower. They were, but by ones and twos rather than by hundreds and thousands as she'd feared. They were quite bad enough by ones and twos.

  By the time the leading Great Ones neared the edge of the radius of insanity, both their human captives were panting and footsore. Another few kilometers like that, Jennifer thought, and she'd look forward to being shot. Her coveralls were soaked with sweat; it ran stinging into her eyes and dripped from her chin.

  Unlike the Foitani from Rof Golan, the Great Ones seemed immune to sweat. They tramped down the processionway as if on parade. Jennifer's uneasy vision of old-time Foitani leading defeated aliens in triumph came back to her. All that made this seem different from a small-scale version of it was that they were walking away from the tower, not toward it.

  Even after the processionway ended, the imperial Foitani strode grandly along. A gnarled shrub grew by their line of march. Jennifer thought nothing of that at first. Then she realized it meant they were out of the precinct of the Great Unknown, for no plants lived within it.

  Ahead, the firelight between the Rof Golani and the Foitani from Odern continued. Both sides had to be going crazy, wondering what had happened to their fliers. Jennifer thought the Great Ones were crazy too. She turned her head toward Greenberg and muttered, "Do they think they're bulletproof, or what?"

  "I don't know," Greenberg muttered back, soft enough so as not to earn the wrath of their watchdog. "I know I'm not, though."

  Just then, the communicator in his pocket spoke up in loud, clear, translated Spanglish. "Humans Bernard and Jennifer, this is Thegun Thegun Nug. You will tell me immediately who those strange Foitani with you are. You will also tell me whether they are in any way responsible for the difficulties our aircraft have encountered over the last few minutes."

  That was Thegun Thegun Nug all the way, Jennifer thought: whatever he wanted, he ordered the humans to deliver immediately. He also had a gift for opening his mouth at just the wrong time.

  The Great One who'd kept Jennifer and Greenberg from talking with each other snarled at them and held out his hand for the communicator. Greenberg gave it to him. He held it close to his face for a moment, as if figuring out how it worked. Then he spoke into it in sharp, abrupt tones.

  Silence stretched. Jennifer wondered how a Foitani translator system that was geared to handling Spanglish would deal with suddenly getting its own tongue back. After a moment, she also wondered how close the language the Foitani from Odern used really was to the speech of the Great Ones.

  Evidently it was close enough, for Thegun Thegun Nug seemed to understand it. The first part of his reply came back in Spanglish. "We greet you, Great Ones, returned to the world at last after so long. We shall serve you to the best of our ability and obey you in all regards, for we—"

  The translator program suddenly went out of the circuit. Thegun Thegun Nug's own voice came over the communicator. Even speaking for themselves, Foitani from Odern seldom sounded excited. Thegun Thegun Nug was no exception. "If I witnessed the Second Coming, I think I'd show a little more feeling than that," Jennifer complained to Greenberg.

  "The Foitani have been waiting ten times as long as Christians," he answered. "Maybe after twenty-eight thousand years, some of the rush has gone out of it."

  "Maybe," Jennifer said. But her own reference to the Second Coming rang a bell in the scholarly part of her mind. What rough beasts were these old-time Foitani, slouching out of the Great Unknown to be reborn? She looked up to the sky, which still had no fliers in it. She shivered. The old-time Foitani might be very rough indeed.

  Somewhere much too close, a Rof Golani hand weapon bar
ked. Bullets shouted past. Jennifer went flat and tried to claw holes in the ground with her nails. She couldn't call this combat, because she had nothing with which to shoot back. But by now she knew what to do when somebody started shooting at her. So did Greenberg, who might have hit the dirt a split second before she did.

  One of the Great Ones was down, too, down and shrieking. His blood was even redder than Jennifer's. His comrades cried out. A couple of them stooped beside him to give what help they could. It wasn't much. His screams went on and on.

  The rest of the imperial Foitani did as Jennifer and Greenberg had—they dove to the ground. But they were armed, and armed with weapons more terrible than any mere firearms. With dreadful thoroughness, they turned those weapons on one possible spot of cover after another, as far as the eye could see.

  A few more bullets came their way, but only a few. They stopped all at once. The silence that settled round the Great Ones was punctuated only by the cries of their wounded comrade.

  Jennifer didn't yet dare to raise her head, but she did turn to face Bernard Greenberg. "Looks like it's going to be the old-time Foitani and the ones from Odern against the Rof Golani," she said.

  "I'd say the Rof Golani are in big trouble," he answered. He lowered his voice. "I'd say we are, too. I don't mean just you and me, I mean everybody."

  "I know what you mean," she answered as quietly. "I've already decided I'm going to tell Pawasar Pawasar Ras that I'm sorry." But she suspected that by then, Pawasar Pawasar Ras would be happy to see the Great Ones out and loose, not afraid of them any more. Thegun Thegun Nug had all but groveled to them on the communicator, at least in the brief part of that conversation that had been in Spanglish.

  The wounded Great One's shrieks shrank to gurgles. He had an amazing amount of blood in his body; the spreading puddle was a couple of meters wide. One of the other imperial Foitani spoke to him. He gasped out an answer. The second Great One touched his weapon to the wounded one's head. The wounded one jerked and lay still.