The Queen stood, walked to the terrace rail, and gazed across the impassable sea. It had insulated her land from an enemy that her bloodline had coped with for centuries. “Bassin, join me, please.”
Bassin and his mother whispered together.
I glanced down at Jeeb, and tapped my ear.
He whirred up on his hind legs, and swiveled his directional mike toward Bassin and the Queen.
The State Department might have frowned at my unmannerly eavesdropping. Bad etiquette fills advice columns. Bad intel fills graveyards.
My earpiece crackled. “—trust him, Mother, most certainly. But don’t rush.”
“Your grandmother’s grandmother didn’t rush to resolve the Hejus! The Clans still bleed for her hesitation.”
“Exactly. Jason will suggest that we ally the Clans. He doesn’t know how impossible that is. Casus would eat your heart off the peace table, unless some Tassini Headman cut Casus’s out first!”
The Queen sighed. “And I would do the same if God favored me with a sharp knife.”
My earpiece hissed silence.
I chinned my radio and whispered into my mike. Nobody really knew what made Slugs tick, but the Army put up with Howard because events usually confirmed his hunches about them. “Howard, why did the Slugs raid the Fair?”
Howard’s voice buzzed in my ear. “Jason? I found something down here in the library that you need to know. Do you remember I said I had a theory about the human population—”
“I found something out up here, too. Answer the question.”
Silence.
Howard said, “Okay. The Pseudocephalopod sees humans like humans see penicillin. A disease organism that can perform service beneficial to Its health. A virulent new strain of us, the disease, that can travel independently between stars is a nightmare to It. And, suddenly, here we are. If we contaminate the humans on this planet, the disease could spread, and threaten Its life.”
“If the Slugs kill all the humans, how will they get their Cavorite?”
“It’s decided to eliminate the dangerous middlemen. But It will probably keep Eolithic-level slaves, like the Tassini prospector Bassin impersonated, to perform mining and transportation.”
I nodded. “If we four gave ourselves up, would the Slugs leave these people alone?”
Howard said, “We’ve already contacted this population. To mix metaphors, how much of a tumor would you leave in your body?”
I nodded. “So the Slugs will wipe these people out, just to make sure they get the four of us? Howard, how much would you bet that your hunch is right?”
More silence.
Then Howard said, “The farm. Jason, don’t do anything until—”
The Queen and Bassin returned, so I clicked off.
Her Majesty looked me in the eye. “General, I have a favor to ask.”
Thirty-Eight
“Would you like my advice?” I asked the Queen.
“General, in my home, it is customary that I ask the first question.”
My cheeks warmed. “Yes, Ma’am.”
“Why would you share advice? If this is not your world?”
“I hate Slugs.”
The Queen nodded. “These Slugs. They killed your comrade, the one who lives on in the little one?”
Howard’s only living relative, his uncle; my mother, and Ord’s all died in the Blitz. The War killed Jude’s father, all four of his grandparents, and his six maternal aunts before he was even born. And those who had died while they served with me were family, too.
I said, “The Slugs killed lots of people we all cared about.”
“Then you have Blood Feud with the Slugs, General.”
I shook my head. “I don’t so much hate the Slugs. I hate what they’ve done. So, get together with the other Clans. We’ll share any intelligence we have, advise your commanders about tactics, weapons design—”
The Queen said, “General, my counterparts among the Casuni and the Tassini would not follow me into battle, any more than you would follow the Slugs. Centuries of Blood Feud divide the Clans.”
This wasn’t the first time I had to referee rival tribesmen, even royals. With the really stubborn ones, I even had to threaten to withhold American advice and logistic support. They sulked awhile, but, eventually, they picked one of them to lead, even if they had to draw straws. Then we watched them get on with their mission. I called it my come-to-Jesus speech.
I cranked up my righteous indignation, and said, “Well, with due respect, your Majesty, somebody’s going to have to step up.” I poked my index finger into the tabletop. “Somebody’s going to have to talk all of you into following somebody.” I poked the tabletop again. “Then somebody is going to have to assemble, and train, and command an army, and lead it into battle. Or else, by your next birthday, nobody is going to be alive on this planet to celebrate, except Slugs, and slaves.” I stared into her eyes and didn’t blink.
The Queen rocked back and raised her eyebrows.
Royals and warlords always recoiled at the come-to-Jesus speech. Nobody ever told them what they had to do.
The breeze died, and a blue-feathered bird fluttered down to a terrace rail and twittered.
Her Majesty hadn’t cracked a smile in an hour, but she beamed at me. “I could not have said it better, General! I thank you. I thank you so very much.” Then she laid her thin hands across mine.
I looked across the table at Bassin. He smiled at me.
My come-to-Jesus speech had never worked that well before. “Thanks for what?”
The Queen said, “Why, for volunteering to be that somebody.”
Thirty-Nine
Crap. Crap, crap, crap.
I said, “I don’t have—”
“Every resource of Marin will be placed under your command.”
Ord whispered in my earpiece. “Sir, we need to talk to you.”
I said to the Queen, “Might I have a few minutes with my staff, your Majesty?”
Ten minutes later, the Captain of Householders pulled the double doors of the Queen’s paneled library shut as he backed out and left us four Earthlings alone.
Howard hung from the upholstered rungs of a sliding ladder attached to the two-story bookshelves, and scooted sideways like a skateboarder, scanning book spines.
“Goddammit, Howard! Get down here!” I stood with my fists stabbed down onto the polished wood top of the room’s central table. Ord stood beside me, his hands clasped behind his back. Jude leaned across the table, and snatched something that looked like a pink banana from a gold bowl in the table’s center.
I said, “The Queen doesn’t want us to advise her. She wants us to take the rap for the whole war. She wants me to get those other barbarians to dance around the maypole with her. It’s ridiculous.”
“A neutral commander seems logical under the circumstances, Sir,” Ord said.
“Circumstances? Unite barbarians who cut each other’s hearts out? So they can fight the scourge of the galaxy with black-powder pistols?”
Howard said, “We probably have at least ten months’ incubation time.”
I rolled my eyes. “Ten months to do what?”
Jude paused with a peeled banana in his hand. “To do the right thing.”
I shook my head. “I’ve never really commanded more than seven hundred soldiers. And that was on Ganymede. It was more like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys than being a General.”
Ord said, “Sir, Jeeb’s ’chips carry more know-how than the Army War College and the MIT Library put together. And we have MAT(D)4’s equipment.”
“That equipment’s U.S. Government property, Sergeant Major.”
All three of them stared at me. Okay, the government-property argument sounded stupid.
I asked, “What’s got into you three? Sergeant Major, you know we can’t take over some aliens’ war! We can’t even shoot at the Chinese!”
“Our present situation is dissimilar, Sir. Our prior formal obligations and loyaltie
s hardly apply.”
I nodded. “And we have no other obligation or loyalty to these people, do we?”
Jude, Howard, and Ord looked around at each other, like they were about to mutiny.
The thud of armored knuckles on wood echoed through the library. I walked to the library’s double doors, and yanked them open. The Captain of Householders saluted me. “Her Majesty’s apologies, Sir. But she asks how much longer you might be, Sir.”
I glanced at my ’Puter, and grumbled under my breath. Queen, schmeen. She wasn’t pushing me into a decision. I said, “We’ve only been in here five minutes. Is her bus leaving, or what?”
The Captain knit his brow beneath his chrome visor as he mouthed, “Bus?” Then he said, “Why, no, Sir. Your ship is.”
I knit my own brow and mouthed, “Ship?”
“A minute longer, Captain.” I pulled the doors closed, turned, and said to my three mutineers, “Am I missing something here?”
Howard frowned. “Yes.”
Forty
Howard laid his hand on a stack of books on the table. “I did some quick reading while you were gone.”
“Real quick,” I said.
“You remember I said I had a theory about the human population here? But I had to fill in some gaps?”
“And you couldn’t tell us before?” Sometimes Evil Spook Howard shanghaied Goofy Geek Howard, like Dr. Strangelove.
Howard asked, “You remember you were surprised to encounter Bassin? Encounter a human on this planet?”
“I’m over it.” I shrugged. “Humans evolved faster here.” I frowned as I thought about Jude and his cosmic rays. “Is that what’s got you puckered? Are we getting mutated here?”
Howard shook his head. “Nothing like that. Remember the Howlers?”
I nodded. “The lizards in the monkey niche.”
Howard picked up a book. “This is a dictionary. There’s no Bren word for monkey. Or any kind of primate.” He waved his hand at the shelves. “In fact, no reference to any mammals bigger than mice, except people.”
I shrugged. “It’s a big library. Maybe you missed a book. Hell, it’s a big planet. Maybe these people still have exploring to do. They evolved from something.”
Howard held up another book. “This is a history treatise. The Casuni and Tassini split with the Marini over religion.”
“From what I heard upstairs, it was three hundred years ago, and they still hate each other.”
“The core difference that caused the split dates back even further. The Casuni and Tassini believe God created man in his own image, and placed him in this world in the beginning.”
“Most religions believe that. They got kicked out for it?”
“The Marini didn’t kick them out. The Casuni and Tassini sects co-existed among the Marini for centuries. Then they felt persecuted, and left.”
“Why?”
“Too many Marini came to accept the growing body of conflicting paleontologic, anthropologic, and archaeologic evidence.”
“Which said?”
“That the Pseudocephalopod placed man on this planet thirty-five thousand years ago.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Man was created by evil giant snails? That might be a bitter pill.”
Howard shook his head. “It’s the simplistic way the Casuni and Tassini see it. But the key word is ‘placed,’ not ‘created.’”
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re saying the Marini believe that the Slugs imported people to this planet?”
“Jason, these people aren’t merely like us. They are us.”
Forty-One
I shook my head. “No. We had carnosaurs, they have carnosaurs. We had duckbills, they have duckbills. You said yourself it’s just parallel evolution.”
“That’s the point. We evolved over millions of years, until modern man emerged about thirty-five thousand years ago. According to the fossil record of Bren, Homo sapiens just popped up here about thirty-five thousand years ago, with no evolutionary precursors. We know the Pseudocephalopod traveled between the two planets often enough that our Firewitch came here like a riderless horse to the nearest barn. The circumstances aren’t clear, but the Pseudocephalopod appears in Bren’s legends from their beginning.”
The Captain of the Guard knocked at the door.
I hollered over my shoulder, “In a minute!” I turned back to Howard. “Why would the Slugs import humans from Earth to Bren?”
“The Pseudocephalopod in its exploration of the universe discovered two things at about the same time, on two planets only weeks’ travel apart. A rich new supply of Cavorite, and a primitive species that was smart enough, and sufficiently resistant to Cavorite’s poisonous properties, to take over the dangerous mining of it. It put Its two discoveries together.”
“Slugs didn’t visit Earth thirty-five thousand years ago.”
“We don’t know that. What should we have found? A missing persons report on a cave wall?”
I shook my head. “Wouldn’t an organism that can fly between stars have come up with something more sophisticated than enslaving primitive mammals? We would have.”
Howard said, “We milk cows. We use cats to exterminate rodents. And I call a system that’s worked perfectly for thirty-five thousand years sophisticated.”
It explained why the Queen didn’t bat an eye when I claimed to be from another world. It was in their lore. Even if Howard was wrong, the Slugs threatened us as much as they threatened every other human on the planet. And we were stranded here, anyway.
Ord and Jude stood beside Howard, with their arms folded.
“You three believe this? These people’s ancestors got kidnapped from their parents? Which are us? So we should fight alongside them?”
Howard said, “Unless you have a better theory.”
Jude said, “Unless you have a better plan.”
Ord said, “It’s your call, Sir.”
The Captain of Householders knocked on the door again.
Command was an orphan’s journey. But, if Howard was right, the journey these orphans had taken made it look small.
I shook my head. “I disagree.”
The three of them frowned.
Jude said, “But, Jason—“
I raised my palm as I looked at Ord. “You said our prior formal obligations don’t apply here. But Congress declared war on the Slugs six days into the Blitz. There was never any geographic limit on the declaration. No treaty ended the war. Neither you, me, nor Colonel Hibble has been discharged. Mr. Metzger, here, can enlist underage if a parent or appropriate guardian consents. And I do.”
Jude grinned.
I looked around at them, sighed, and slapped my palms on the table. “So let’s go save the human race. Again.”
Forty-Two
I’m no swabbie, so I wouldn’t know a barge if I waterskied across one, but the Queen’s Barge turned out to be nicer than it sounded.
It was a sailing ship slightly bigger than the one we arrived on, but, by my best estimate as we sailed north retracing the route we came by, the Royal Barge sailed twice as fast.
Maybe the Barge was faster because of its sails, which were striped in two shades of silver. Maybe it was the onyxwood hull, which sizzled as it cut through the sea. Maybe it was the crew, so pressed, polished, and square-cornered that even Ord admitted they were okay, for Squids.
The speed couldn’t have been helped by the weight of the Queen’s traveling library, which Howard inhaled to learn The Natures of our new home world. It couldn’t have been helped by The Basket, a rope nest that dangled from the fore spit, from which a rotation of the best harpooners in Marin kept watch. I was told that any kraken that strayed into the submerged kelp forests that choked the shallows inside six fathoms would be dead meat. But I was glad the Ship Master stayed well shoreward of the Red Line.
And the Barge’s speed certainly wasn’t helped by the weight of her tableware.
The evening following our afternoon audience with her Majesty, u
s four Earthlings and Bassin sat around the Salon’s onyxwood dining table, while light from the swaying chandelier sparkled off the solid gold plates in front of us.
Howard held up a shellfish on his fork. “On Earth, we’d call this a flexicalymenid trilobite.”
Bassin shrugged shoulders now covered by the gold epaulets of the Crown Prince of Marin, then smiled. “Our Chef has sautéed those each first night at sea since I was three.”
Howard chewed his forkful. “These should have gone extinct at least a hundred million years ago. Not only should they not coexist with humans, they shouldn’t coexist with dinosaurs.”
Jude asked Howard, “Why do things go extinct?”
Howard poked his glasses back on his nose. “Rise of competing species. Environmental change.”
“Like the comet and the dinosaurs?” Jude shoveled a second helping onto his plate.
Howard nodded. “A bolide impact did close the Permian contemporaneous with trilobite extinction. And—”
I pointed my knife at Howard to stop his ramble, and said to Jude, “From Howard, that’s a yes.” I had ten months to learn what made the Clans tick. Howard could discuss bugs on his own time.
I turned to Bassin as I stabbed my sautéed fossil. “Is this why the Plains Clans call Marini Fisheaters?”
“Eight hundred years ago, the Plague of Men swept Bren.”
Howard frowned. “Plague of Men?”
Bassin nodded. “Women suffered mild symptoms, but the male organ blackened horribly, then fell away, entirely. The histories say the plague was carried in these shellfish.”
“Paugh!” Jude spit trilobite into his napkin, then stuck his tongue out and scrubbed the cloth against it.
Bassin blinked, but kept his eyes on me. “The church taught the shunning of seafood. When the plague had run its course, the shunning stopped, except among the most religious. Historians date the split of the Clan stocks from that time. The cultures diverged for five hundred years. The flight of the Tassini and Casuni to the Highlands, the Hejus, came three hundred years later. The Clans have been at war since.”
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