3xT

by Harry Turtledove

  Jennifer gulped. She hoped the Foitani from Odern would denounce Voskop W Wurd for the bloodthirsty barbarian he was. But Aissur Aissur Rus said only, "We use lethal injections ourselves. Still, the principle remains the same."

  Greenberg whispered, "I wonder what kwopillot do to ordinary Foitani when they're the ones in power."

  "Nothing good, I'd bet," Jennifer whispered back.

  "You Oderna are too soft with your aliens," Voskop W Wurd said to Pawasar Pawasar Ras. "There they go, plotting who knows what between themselves."

  "Repeat yourselves, humans Jennifer and Bernard, loud enough for the translator to pick up your words," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.

  Before Jennifer could repeat herself, a Foitani voice started shouting from a ceiling speaker. The translator brought her the gist of the announcement. "Honored kin-group leader, radar reports the central tower of the Great Unknown has lifted off from the surface of Gilver and is performing as a spacecraft. We have visual confirmation as well. Please advise."

  VIII

  "A spacecraft?" Pawasar Pawasar Ras, Aissur Aissur Rus, and Voskop W Wurd said it in the Foitani language, Jennifer and Greenberg in Spanglish.

  Voskop W Wurd recovered first. He shouted in the Foitani language. "Shoot the foul-smelling thing down," the translator said. "Your ships and mine together, Oderna. We can kill each other any time we choose. The kwopillot will not wait."

  "That is a reasonable assessment of the situation," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said after a moment's pause for thought. He spoke to the ceiling. "All ships from Odern are directed to destroy the spacecraft which has arisen from the Great Unknown. Warleader Voskop W Wurd instructs Rof Golani ships to cooperate in this effort."

  "Missiles launching," the ceiling speaker reported.

  Voskop W Wurd bared his teeth. "This is not a proper headquarters, Pawasar Pawasar Ras. If I cannot bite the foe in person, at least let me see how my fellows' fangs sink in."

  "As you wish," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said after another pause. "I do not think you or your followers would be in a good position to betray us." He rapped on the wall behind him, then hurried through the door he had called into being. Aissur Aissur Rus and his other aides followed. The Foitani from Rof Golan were right behind.

  The Rof Golani did not bother making the doorway close after themselves. "Come on," Jennifer said to Greenberg. "If we follow them, we may get some idea of what's going on."

  "We may get our heads bitten off, too—literally, if the Rof Golani have anything to say about it," he answered. All the same, he went after the Foitani. So did Jennifer.

  They had to trot to catch up with the bigger aliens, then to keep up with them. A couple of Rof Golani snarled at them, but otherwise left them alone. They hurried into the command post hard on Voskop W Wurd's heels.

  The plan had been chaotic enough before the Rof Golani came in. Foitani from Odern ran here and there, shouted at one another and into headsets, pointed at screens and holovid radar plots. A couple of the dark blue Foitani turned in threatening fashion toward the gray-blue interlopers from Rof Golan. Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "They are become our cobelligerents against the flying tower. Furnish Voskop W Wurd with communications gear, that he may command his spacecraft to cooperate with us against the common foe, for kwopillot cannot be other than the enemies of all proper Foitani."

  One of the Foitani from Odern gave Voskop W Wurd a headset. He screamed into it. Watching one of the radar tanks, Jennifer saw red sparks begin to move in unison with blue ones as both colors converged on a bigger white point of light.

  Greenberg was watching the tank, too. He said, "The Rof Golani came here intending to smash up Gilver. They ought to be able to blow the tower into the middle of next week, no matter how big it is."

  "Do we want them to?" Jennifer asked. "I know they say the old-time Foitani are evil and vicious, but as far as I can see, they're just acting the same way the modern ones do. And since when are aliens' sex lives any of our business?"

  "I'd feel better about being neutral if we still had a way home in case the Great Ones wrecked the Harold Meeker," he answered. "As long as it's sitting outside this base, I'm for the Foitani from Odern and Rof Golan."

  "Something to that," Jennifer had to admit

  She and Greenberg did their best to stay out from underfoot as Foitani hurried this way and that. Jumping clear was all up to them, for the Foitani would not change directions for their sake. Jennifer wondered if that was because humans were too small for Foitani to bother noticing, or just because they were non-Foitani and therefore not worth dodging. Whichever way it was—she suspected the latter—she quickly learned to grow eyes in the back of her head to keep from getting trampled.

  A Rof Golani ship abruptly vanished from the radar tank. Voskop W Wurd screamed something that the translator rendered as, "How extremely unfortunate." A good deal of juice seemed to have been squeezed out somewhere.

  More ships started disappearing. No matter what sort of Foitani perverts crewed it, no matter that it had been grounded for twenty-eight thousand years, the ship that had been a tower was a formidable killing machine. Voskop W Wurd made noises suggesting a wild animal with a leg caught in a trap. Pawasar Pawasar Ras sounded calmer—that seemed the way on Odern—but no happier.

  After a dismayingly short while, the course of the battle grew clear: the Great Ones were mopping up everything the modern Foitani could throw at them. Pawasar Pawasar Ras ordered one of his few surviving ships to break off and head back to Odern.

  Voskop W Wurd yowled a phrase that sounded as if it would have made a pretty good operations order for the end of the world. "A cowardly act," the translator reported bloodlessly.

  "By no means," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "Suppose we are defeated and destroyed here. That will leave the kwopillot free to rampage through the Foitani sphere, with no one to know what they are until they come within smelling range. Our homeworlds must be warned. What I do is wisdom. Deny it if you may."

  The Rof Golani warleader did not reply directly, but spoke into his headset. Before long, one of the red blips in the radar tank turned tail and boosted toward hyperdrive kick-in. Voskop W Wurd said no more about it. No Foitan Jennifer had ever seen was any good at admitting he was wrong.

  "I just hope the Foitani sphere is all these revived Great Ones worry about for a while," Greenberg said. "If they have records of humans, they know where Earth is."

  "They'd find out soon enough anyway, from dealing with the Foitani from Odern," Jennifer answered. It was not much consolation. One way or another, trouble was coming.

  Trouble was, in fact, already here. The ship that had spent a geological epoch being a tower was still dreadfully efficient in its own role. Gallant to the end, the Foitani from Odern and Rof Golan kept attacking long after they must have known they were doomed. Back on Earth, a long time ago, tribesmen had shown insane courage by charging straight at machine-gun nests. But for making them end up dead in gruesomely large numbers, their courage hadn't got them anything. Similar bravery served the Foitani no better now.

  "Attack from space imminent," Pawasar Pawasar Ras called. "Prepare to resist to the end."

  Jennifer was certain the Foitani would do just that. She was also certain the end had become quite imminent. She squeezed Bernard Greenberg's hand, hard. "I love you, too," she said. When the end comes, some words should not be left unspoken.

  He hugged her. She hugged him, too. She did not care what the Foitani thought, not now. The only good thing she saw about being here was that the end would probably be quick. The Great Ones up there had overwhelming weapons and could hardly miss.

  Voskop W Wurd said, "Get me a hand weapon, Oderna, that I may shoot at my slayers as they destroy me."

  Jennifer watched the tower-ship in the radar tank. It hung overhead, an outsized sword of Damocles. Suddenly one of the communications screens lit up. A green-blue Foitani face peered out of it: a Great One. A technician spoke to Pawasar Pawasar Ras. "Honored kin-group lea
der, the, ah, Foitan Solut Mek Kem would address you."

  Jennifer's heart leaped. Surely one did not seek to address a person one was on the very point of destroying.

  Pawasar Pawasar Ras saw things in a different light. He said, "So you have called to gloat, have you, kwopil?" Jennifer's hopes plunged as far and as fast as they had risen. Pawasar Pawasar Ras could not help knowing his own species, knowing what its members did and did not do.

  The Great One called Solut Mek Kem said, "By your murderousness, I gather your kind still exists, vodran." Jennifer felt like screaming at the translator program for falling asleep on the words that really mattered. Meanwhile, Solut Mek Kem went on, "We all hoped earthgrip would have taken you by the time we returned to the sphere at large."

  But for once, the problem was not the translator's fault. Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "Vodran? I do not know this word, Solut Mek Kem."

  Voskop W Wurd echoed him, less politely: "Trust the stinking kwopillot to come up with a foul-smelling name for proper people."

  "You've grown old in depravity, to think it the proper state for Foitani," Solut Mek Kem said. "I see the race has had time to degenerate physically as well as morally, else our sphere would not be plagued with such hideous specimens as you."

  Voskop W Wurd told the Great One what he—or was it she this time?—could do to himself, in explicit anatomical detail. Jennifer did not think any of the suggestions sounded like much fun and did not think many were physically possible. Those limitations didn't bother humans in a temper, and they didn't bother Voskop W Wurd, either.

  When the Rof Golani warleader ran down, Pawasar Pawasar Ras added, "You tax us with murderousness, yet outside this tower which is now a ship, you kwopillot wantonly slaughtered a great many Foitani, many of them unarmed and all of them mentally disabled by whatever means you employed to keep us from your precinct on Gilver."

  "You are vodranet," Solut Mek Kem said. "You deserve no better. As I said, we had hoped our fellows would have exterminated you from the galaxy by the time we reawakened. Though I see it is not so, we shall join with the worlds of our kind and finish the job once and for all."

  "What worlds of your own kind?" Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "Kwopillot have no worlds. They merely plague true Foitani whenever a nest of them appears. This is so on every world where our kind survives, and has been so ever since the Suicide Wars cast our sphere down into barbarism."

  "Lie all you like, vodran," the old-time Foitan said. "We could not have been destroyed in a few centuries."

  Jennifer hurried over to Pawasar Pawasar Ras and tugged on the fur of his flank. "May I speak to the Great One?" she asked urgently.

  Pawasar Pawasar Ras brushed her away, or tried to. She hung onto his massive arm. "Are you stricken mad?" he said. "Get away. This is not your concern."

  Unexpectedly, Voskop W Wurd came to her rescue. "Why not let the creature talk to the stinking kwopillot?" he demanded. "Do kwopillot deserve any better?"

  "There is some truth in what you say, warleader," Pawasar Pawasar Ras admitted. Under other circumstances, Jennifer would have been furious at the denigration inherent in what the Rof Golani Foitan said and in Pawasar Pawasar Ras's agreement with it. Now all she cared about was having this Solut Mek Kem hear her. After a pause for thought that seemed endless, Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "Very well, human Jennifer, you may speak. Here." He overturned a plastic container for her. "Stand on this, so you will be tall enough for the vision pickup to notice you. I shall stand close by, that my translator may render your words into the speech of the Great Ones."

  "Thank you, honored kin-group leader." Jennifer clambered onto the container. She could tell Solut Mek Kem saw her; the old-time Foitan's teeth came out. She said, "Honored Foitan—"

  "So you vodranet consort with sub-Foitani, do you?" Solut Mek Kem interrupted. "We might have expected it of you."

  "Will you listen to me?" Jennifer said. "Your tower hasn't been sitting on Gilver for a few centuries. You've been there twenty-eight thousand of your years."

  "It is amusing, vodran." Solut Mek Kem still refused to speak directly to Jennifer. "But why should I listen to its lies any more than yours?"

  "I presume your tower or spaceship or whatever it really is recorded Bernard and me when we went inside," Jennifer said. "Check those records, why don't you? For one thing, you'll see we have stunners that aren't like yours. For another, you'll see one of your people comparing us to—I don't know whether they're specimens or records of my kind back when we were savages. You figure out how long it might take for a race to go from savages to star travelers. And if I'm lying, then you can go right on ignoring me."

  The screen that had shown Solut Mek Kem went blank. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "Well done, human Jennifer. You have made the wicked pervert pause and examine assumptions, something we did not succeed in accomplishing."

  Bernard Greenberg said, "You ought to think about examining your own assumptions, Aissur Aissur Rus. Since when is someone who differs sexually from you necessarily a pervert—or necessarily wicked, for that matter?"

  "Kwopillot are wicked perverts," Aissur Aissur Rus said.

  Jennifer felt like banging her head against a wall; Aissur Aissur Rus not only wasn't examining his assumptions, he hadn't even noticed them. She asked, "What's a vodran?"

  "We do not know this word, either," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "It is a piece of offal the kwopillot have appended to the pure and beautiful speech of the Great Ones, nothing more."

  Just then, Solut Mek Kem reappeared in the holovid screen. "I will converse with the sub-Foitani creature," he announced.

  "We call ourselves humans," Jennifer said pointedly.

  The Great Ones, whether perverted or not, had all the arrogance of their descendants and then some. Solut Mek Kem said, "I care nothing for what you call yourself, creature. I have some concern, however, over your statements. It appears true that Foitani encountered your kind in the past. You were noted as being uncommonly brutish and scheduled for extermination. Why this failed to take place is a matter of some puzzlement to me."

  Jennifer opened her mouth, then closed it again. Hearing that her species was going to have been killed off was not something she could take in at once. Into her silence, Aissur Aissur Rus said, "No doubt the Suicide Wars intervened and prevented the Foitani of that distant time from completing the protocol they envisioned."

  "Suicide Wars?" It was Solut Mek Kem's turn to pause. Not even a Foitan could care for the sound of that.

  "Suicide Wars," Aissur Aissur Rus repeated. He spoke to the command center's computer system. A holovid star map appeared in front of him. "This is the area the Foitani once inhabited, not so?"

  "No. Wait. Yes, it appears to be," Solut Mek Kem said. "We customarily oriented our maps with the other direction to the top, thus my brief confusion."

  "One more thing about the Great Ones of which we were ignorant," Aissur Aissur Rus observed before returning to the business at hand. "These are the known Foitani worlds now." The few points of light Dargnil Dargnil Lin had shown Jennifer back on Odern now sparkled in front of her. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "All other worlds within the sphere are devoid of our kind, or even of intelligent sub-Foitani life forms."

  "More vodran lies, fabrications to confuse me," Solut Mek Kem said.

  "If you will arrange a data link with us, we will supply you with documentation sufficient to change your mind," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "We could not have prepared this volume of information in advance to trick you, you will realize, because we had no idea we would discover you alive in the tower, and still less that you would prove to be kwopillot." More flexible than most of his kind, Aissur Aissur Rus managed not to affix a malodorous epithet to the term.

  "Send your data," Solut Mek Kem said. "The Vengeance will refrain from destroying you until they are evaluated—you are no spacecraft, and cannot run. But woe betide you if we detect falsehood. It will only make your fate the harsher."

  How could any fate be worse th
an destruction? Jennifer wondered. She did not speak her thought aloud. The Foitani might have answers to questions like that.

  "Did you notice the name of the ship?" Bernard Greenberg said. "The old-time Foitani who set up the Great Unknown must have figured their side might not win the war. I wonder if they figured no one would win it."

  Jennifer thought about the map Aissur Aissur Rus had shown to Solut Mek Kem. She thought about the sphere the Foitani had once ruled, about the handful of worlds they still inhabited. She thought about how many other species the imperial Foitani must have destroyed, about the calm way Solut Mek Kem remarked that humanity was on their list. Softly, she said, "Maybe that's just as well."

  "Maybe it is," Greenberg agreed.

  The Foitani in the command center seemed to have forgotten about the humans again, now that Jennifer had bought them some time. That was typical of them, she thought, but she could not make herself angry. She only wished they'd never heard of her in the first place.

  Solut Mek Kem came back on the screen after perhaps half an hour. He said, "Our computers have been analyzing and summarizing the information you are presenting to us. The problem does seem rather more complex than we may have envisioned."

  From a Foitan, even so small an admission had to spring from profound shock. Jennifer realized that at once. She wondered if Pawasar Pawasar Ras or Voskop W Wurd would see it. To them, it might be taken as only a sign of weakness. Before either of them could speak, she climbed on the plastic box and said loudly, "Then you agree it's wiser to talk, Solut Mek Kem, than to try to fight off every starship from every Foitani world that still knows about spaceflight?"

  Pawasar Pawasar Ras growled at her. Voskop W Wurd snarled at her and took a step in her direction. His clawed hands stretched greedily toward her. She felt like Miles Vorkosigan—much too small and extremely breakable. How would the Middle English SF hero have handled this particular mess? Audacity, that was his only way. She went on quickly, not giving any Foitan a chance to talk: "A peace conference seems the appropriate solution, don't you all think? None of the modern Foitani are likely to get any of the technology of the Great Ones without peace, unless the Vengeance shoots it at them. And you Foitani from long ago will only be hounded all through this sphere unless you come to some kind of terms with your modern relatives."