"You and me both." Greenberg pulled off his shoes and stared at his feet. "I keep waiting for them to swell up right before my eyes."
"Me, too," Jennifer said. She shed her shoes, too, and sighed in exquisite relief as she wiggled her toes. "I didn't come out here set up to hike." She swigged from her canteen. She would have killed for a cold glass of beer; warm, rather stale water was at the moment a more than adequate substitute.
Greenberg also ate some Foitani people chow. He washed it down with his own water. "Better?a little better," he said. "If they're going to the research base tomorrow, at least they won't walk our legs off, Jennifer… Jennifer?"
Jennifer didn't answer him. She hadn't heard him. She lay sprawled on her side in the dirt, fast asleep.
* * *
The old imperial Foitani must have eliminated or at least intimidated the Rof Golani on the ground, for Jennifer woke up the next morning. At first, she wasn't sure she liked the idea; she felt almost as bad as she had after Thegun Thegun Nug stunned her.
She grimly went through a stretching routine she hadn't used since she was in the field on her last trading run. By the time she started to sweat, some of the kinks in her legs and back began to come loose. The Great Ones watched her with impassive curiosity.
Greenberg also needed limbering up after a rugged day and a night on the ground. When he was done stretching, he looked around for a bush to go behind. But when he started to go behind it, one of the old-time Foitani growled and lifted his weapon. Greenberg sighed. "Sorry about this, but I can't wait any longer," he said to Jennifer as he turned his back on her. She heard him open his fly.
"Don't turn around," she warned him. "In coveralls, this is a lot more inconvenient for me than it is for you." As she unfastened herself and squatted, she thought again that this was a problem Middle English science-fiction writers had ignored, especially for women. She wished she could ignore it herself. She also wished she could ignore the Foitani. As they had while she was exercising, they studied her now.
Relieved?and also relieved of her dignity?she got to her feet. "It's all right now," she told Greenberg.
"All right," he said, and turned around. "Shall we have a lovely breakfast of dry dog food?"
"Since our other choice is leaves and whatever Gilver uses for bugs, I suppose we might as well."
They crunched for a while. Jennifer watched the Great Ones while they watched her. They might have been sleeping on featherbeds instead of hard dirt; not a single tuft of fur seemed out of place. Some of them wore belts with pouches. They took what looked like slabs of raw meat out of the pouches, shared them around, and devoured them.
After a cautious pull at his canteen?who could guess when he'd get a chance to refill it??Greenberg said, "I meant what I told you yesterday, you know."
"What did you tell me yesterday?" she asked, a little testily?far, far too much had happened yesterday. When his face fell, she remembered all at once what he'd told her. She felt herself turn red. "I'm sorry, Bernard. I know you did."
"And so?" he said.
It was a good question. Over the years, a lot of men had said they loved her, a lot more than she wanted to hear it from. To many of them, it meant nothing more than that they wanted to go to bed with her. She was already going to bed with Bernard, and it had been her idea as much as his. She knew that saidsomething. But living with Ali Bakhtiar, in the beginning, had been as much her idea as his, too.
She shook her head. "Bernard, right now I just don't know what to say to you. I think maybe the only thing I ought to say right now is that this isn't really the time or place to say much of anything. You know I'm fond of you?or if you don't, I've been doing something wrong." She smiled wryly. "But love? I'm not even sure what love is. Let's talk about it later, when we can think straight and feel something besides being scared out of our minds."
"Fair enough," he said, his voice unreadable.
They had no further chance to talk about it, anyhow. The imperial Foitani, with the gift for timing all Foitani races seemed to share, chose that moment to break camp and start for the research base of the Foitani from Odern. They still didn't want the humans talking while they marched. A warning growl made that quite clear.
The Great One who had Greenberg's communicator used it to call the base. Jennifer heard Pawasar Pawasar Ras's name. That was all she understood of the conversation. She wished for some of the tricks to enhance recall that science-fiction writers had invented: memory-RNA pills and who knew what else, all guaranteed to let somebody learn a language in twenty-four hours flat or your money back. Trouble was, nobody'd bothered with such things after effective translator programs came along. Trouble with that was, as she'd found more times among the Foitani than she cared to remember, take away the translator program and she was helpless without it.
Far off to the south, gunfire crackled. From several kilometers away, it sounded cheery rather than terrifying. The Great Ones grew alert when they heard it, but it wasn't close enough even for folk as aggressive as they to hose down the area with their hand weapons.
The breeze, a fickle thing, played with the marching Great Ones and wearily trudging humans, blowing sometimes from behind them but more often into their faces. The old-time Foitani ignored it; like their descendants from Odern, they were good at ignoring anything they didn't care for. Jennifer rubbed grit from her eyes as she tramped along. Stopping didn't seem like a good idea, not with that Foitan and his weapon right beside her.
She walked past a couple of emplacements the Foitani from Odern had built to protect the way to the Great Unknown. No one came out to greet the returning imperial Foitani. She looked down into one gun pit close by the side of the road. A blue Foitan lay inside, sprawled and dead.
"I hope Pawasar Pawasar Ras knows what he's doing, treating with the Great Ones," she whispered to Greenberg. She got another growl from the armed Great One for that, but no more, for it was the first thing she'd said since the day's journey began.
When the party of Great Ones came within a few hundred meters of the research base, Foitani from Odern emerged to meet them. Jennifer watched the old-time Foitani watching the blue successor race. She wondered what the Great Ones thought of them as compared to the insanely aggressive Foitani who'd developed on Rof Golan.
She still had trouble telling one Foitan from another, but thought she recognized Pawasar Pawasar Ras and Thegun Thegun Nug among the Foitani from Odern in the group that had come out of the base. All the Foitani from Odern bowed low and chanted at the Great Ones. Without the translator, Jennifer couldn't be sure, but she thought the chant was the same as the one her kidnappers had intoned when they bowed to the ancient ruins on Odern after they'd brought her there: here were the Great Ones, freed from earthgrip at last.
The gesture of submission seemed to have meaning to the imperial Foitani. They came out of the skirmish line in which they'd advanced and formed up into a single compact group. Once they were all together, they bowed, too, though not nearly so low as the Foitani from Odern had.
After that recognition ceremony, ancient and modern Foitani walked toward one another. The two groups were only a few meters apart when the breeze stopped blowing into Jennifer's face. She knew a moment's relief?no more grit in my eyes, she thought.
The Foitani from Odern had been moving forward with every sign of the reverence they gave to anything that pertained to the Great Ones. All at once, they stopped short. They bared their teeth. Pawasar Pawasar Ras?Jennifer was sure now it was the project leader?growled something deep in his throat.
Without any more preamble than that, the Foitani from Odern roared and charged at the Great Ones.
* * *
For an incredulous half a second, Jennifer gaped at the onrushing blue Foitani. Then Bernard Greenberg tackled her. A couple of Great Ones managed to get their weapons up before the Foitani from Odern crashed into them, but only a couple. Most had their deadly small arms torn or kicked from their hands before they could use them.<
br />
Even without weapons, the Great Ones were a match for the suddenly berserk Foitani from Odern. They smashed them to the ground with a savage skill for which battleball scouts would have paid millions. All Jennifer and Greenberg tried to do was roll out of the way of the battling behemoths.
A Great One who hadn't been disarmed slew a pair of Foitani from Odern. Then, all at once, he ceased to be. Jennifer closed her eyes against a terrible glare that had already struck and vanished?an antiship laser, fired now at a ground target. Another old-time Foitan sizzled into nonexistence. A voice from the research base, amplified to a volume that approximated divine wrath, bellowed a command.
The imperial Foitani seemed better at giving orders than taking them. Another Great One fired in the direction from which the laser had come. Jennifer didn't know whether he took it out. Another laser, from a different position, cut him down. That bolt flew much too close to her. She felt a blast of heat and smelled ozone as if lightning had struck nearby. Only a few meters away, sandy ground bubbled into glass.
The amplified voice roared again, louder than ever. This time, the Great Ones, those few left on their feet, spread their arms wide. The ones with weapons dropped them. Only a couple of Foitani from Odern were in any shape to keep fighting. Regardless of whether their foes had quit, they started to attack again. The voice from the base cried out once more, this time with different words. Reluctantly, the Foitani from Odern held back. One?Jennifer thought it was Pawasar Pawasar Ras?shouted what was plainly a protest. The voice from inside the base shouted him down.
More Foitani from Odern emerged. All of this group were heavily armed, with rifles similar to the ones the Rof Golani carried. An armored fighting vehicle also came forth from some concealed entrance and clanked toward the Great Ones. It carried a fat laser tube and a cannon whose muzzle seemed to Jennifer's frightened eyes to be about as wide as her head.
The armed modern Foitani advanced on the imperials who had come out of the Great Unknown. They were more than cautious but less than the bloodthirsty maniacs into which Pawasar Pawasar Ras's party had turned. Greenberg noticed that at once. "How come they don't want to tear the Great Ones limb from limb?" he said.
"The breeze is blowing from the base to us again," Jennifer answered. "Maybe they can't smell them any more."
"Maybe the Great Ones haven't had a bath in the last twenty-eight thousand years," he said.
Jennifer made a face at him. Taking advantage of the fact that nobody was going to point a gun at her for talking, she said, "Maybe they?"
The voice from the base boomed forth once more, this time in Spanglish. "Humans Bernard and Jennifer, this is Aissur Aissur Rus. I suggest you come into the base through the passage from which our soldiers have just debouched. They are ordered to let you pass through them. We would not want you to come to harm through staying too close to the kwopillot from the Great Unknown."
"The who?" Jennifer said at the same time as Greenberg said, "The what?" The translator program had missed a word. Maybe it didn't have a Spanglish equivalent, even an approximate one. That happened now and again with translator programs. Trouble was, when it did, the word that refused to translate was almost always vitally important.
Aissur Aissur Rus didn't answer either Greenberg or Jennifer. Neither of them felt like asking again?whatever kwopillot were, he'd made it clear it wasn't safe to be anywhere around them. The behavior of Pawasar Pawasar Ras had done a pretty good job of that, too. Both humans hurried to pass through the ranks of the Foitani from Odern. The big, blue aliens ignored them, keeping eyes, attention, and weapons on the Great Ones.
The fickle breeze shifted again just as Jennifer was about to go down into the underground research base. Behind her, the Foitani from Odern bellowed in rage. A rifle began to bark, then another and another. Aissur Aissur Rus was screaming for the soldiers to stop shooting, but they wouldn't stop. The Great Ones went down like ninepins. When they were all dead, the soldiers rushed forward to kick and beat at their shattered bodies.
Sickened, Jennifer turned away. The kibbles she'd eaten sat like a ball of lead in her stomach. She hoped they'd stay down. "Back inside the radius of doom, the old-time Foitani treated the ones from Rof Golan the same way," Greenberg said.
"I know," Jennifer said. That had been only yesterday. She shook her head in disbelief. "I didn't like that, either."
"Neither did I. Let's get away from the Foitani with guns before they decide we might make good targets, too."
She let Greenberg take her by the elbow and lead her down the passageway. As soon as they were at the bottom, Aissur Aissur Rus spoke to them in Spanglish once more. "Come immediately to the command center. The ceiling light will direct you."
Following the moving light like a will-o'-the-wisp, they soon came to the screen-filled chamber from which Aissur Aissur Rus had spoken. He said, "I congratulate you on penetrating the tower at the center of the Great Unknown, humans. But had I known it was filled with kwopillot, I would have agreed with Pawasar Pawasar Ras that it remain sealed forever. I thought them merely the stuff of legend and modern depravity. Would I had been right."
"What are kwopillot?" Jennifer demanded. Bernard Greenberg opened his mouth, then closed it again. He'd evidently been about to ask the same question.
But before Aissur Aissur Rus could answer, Pawasar Pawasar Ras and Thegun Thegun Nug limped into the chamber. They were dirty and bloody and looked more like beasts of prey than intelligent beings. "Kwopillot!" Pawasar Pawasar Ras exclaimed. Had she not thought he'd tear her limb from limb, Jennifer would have kicked him.
Thegun Thegun Nug said something. Aissur Aissur Rus's translator turned it into Spanglish. "Filthy, reeking perverts! If the Suicide Wars were fought against them, suppressing them was worth the price."
"Aye, so it was," Pawasar Pawasar Ras declared. Aissur Aissur Rus didn't say anything, but he didn't look as if he disagreed, either.
"What are kwopillot?" Greenberg got the question out this time.
Word by word, the translator turned it into the Foitani language. That seemed to remind Aissur Aissur Rus and his colleagues that the humans were there. His answer, though, was less than helpful. "Never mind, human Bernard. They are practically extinct, and it is as well."
"No, they aren't," Greenberg said loudly. "Whatever they are, you may have murdered as many of them as came out of the tower in the middle of the Great Unknown, but how many do you think are still left in there? It's a big tower, you know, and it's awake or active or whatever you want to call it, thanks to us. What do you want to bet that more kwopillot will pop out of it soon?"
Aissur Aissur Rus, Pawasar Pawasar Ras, and Thegun Thegun Nug all bared their teeth at him. Thegun Thegun Nug growled something. Aissur Aissur Rus's translator turned it into, "What a terrible thing to say." Jennifer suspected the original had been rather more pungent.
Aissur Aissur Rus said, "Unfortunately, the human may well be right. We should make preparations on that assumption, at any rate. Those who came forth may have been kwopillot, but they were also Great Ones, with all the powers we have long believed the Great Ones held. If the kwopillot truly hold all the resources contained within the Great Unknown, how are we to resist them?"
"Better to ally with the Rof Golani than to risk such filth spreading through our sphere," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.
Maybe he had just been indulging in rhetoric, but Aissur Aissur Rus took him up on it. "An excellent suggestion, honored kin-group leader. Call them at once; we have already observed that they too know the proper response to this menace."
"As you say, Aissur Aissur Rus." Pawasar Pawasar Ras went over to a communications panel and started talking into it. Before long, the image of a gray-blue Foitan from Rof Golan appeared on the screen on front of him.
"What are kwopillot?" Jennifer asked. It was the third time the humans had tried that question, and they were still without an answer.
"They are disgusting," Thegun Thegun Nug said. "I go to wash thei
r reek from my fur." He stalked off.
Jennifer turned to Aissur Aissur Rus. "Will you please explain what's going on, and why you've all started killing each other on sight?"
Aissur Aissur Rus made a noise that might have come straight from a wolf's throat. The translator rendered it with a sigh. Jennifer had some qualms about the translation; nothing that sounded so… carnivorous… had any business being merely a sigh. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "This subject is not easy for us to discuss, human Jennifer. It is also one we never thought could arise?as the Great Ones were believed to be extinct, surely the degenerate kwopillot had to be gone. Sadly, this now appears not to be the case."
"So what are kwopillot, and why do you keep calling them such nasty names?"
"Wait a minute," Bernard Greenberg put in, his eyes lighting up. "This has to do with sex, doesn't it? Otherwise you wouldn't mind so much talking about it."
"You are, as usual, astute, human Bernard," Aissur Aissur Rus said with another of those bloodthirsty-sounding sighs. "Indeed, the matter of the kwopillot does turn on sex, or more precisely on gender."
He paused, plainly not eager to go on without being prodded further. Jennifer looked at Greenberg in open-mouthed admiration. His shot in the dark had struck home?had it ever! If the Foitani were anything like most other species, they'd find sex worth fighting about no matter how technologically advanced they were. All at once, the Suicide Wars had a rationale that made some kind of sense.
Aissur Aissur Rus still stood silent. He looked big and blue and unhappy. Jennifer said, "May I ask, solely for the purpose of remedying my own ignorance, and with no desire to cause offense, what kwopillot do that other Foitani disapprove of?"
The variant of the trader's standard question paid off. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "You know that my race is unusual among intelligent species, in that we are born female and become male after our thirtieth year, more or less."
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