This one was even fatter than the Greatmother of Beert's nest, and a lot more fashionably dressed. She wore silvery body armor that covered not only her belly but nearly her whole torso. It struck me that that had to be uncomfortably heavy. Garments and all, the creature had to mass at least a quarter of a ton.
But not, of course, here. She came floating weightlessly into the reception chamber, towed by a pair of glass robots to save her the bother of swarming along the cables herself. Her long neck was covered with bangles like a Ubangi's, and it was dancing a hula of greeting. The Greatmother gave the most cursory of glances at the clutch of us lesser species, and addressed herself directly to Beert. "I welcome you, Djabeertapritch of the Two Eights," she declared, touching her nose almost to his. "We are glad to have you in our nest, but how does it happen that you come?"
It was clear that Beert was the one she was welcoming. I was sure that if Pirraghiz and I had turned up without a live Horch as company, our reception would have been a lot less hospitable. For Beert, she was different. The Greatmother was thrilled to meet a conspecific who had endured the vile captivity of the Others. She wasn't disposed to question Beert's stumbling explanation of his nest's history and the rapidly invented mix-up that had brought him here, either. Actually his rather creative description of the blunders that had made it happen amused her. She had a superior kind of tolerance of one planet in the Horch federation for another, reminding me of the way Canadians talked about New Zealanders in the British Commonwealth. "Well, what do you expect of a bunch of Eight Plus Threes?" she asked jovially. She cast a mildly disapproving eye at the amphibian and me. "It is odd, however," she added, "that Horch should concern themselves with the problems of lesser species."
"They are more worthy than they seem, Greatmother," Beert said humbly. "Permit me to introduce them-"
She shrugged that idea away impatiently, neck and arms all twisting at once. "My least of grandsons is interested in such other organisms. I am not. But tell me of your captivity, Djabeertapritch. You were allowed no machines at all? But how did you live?"
I am sure Beert had more urgent things to talk to her about than his nest's tribulations, but he was not capable of denying the request of a Greatmother. "We were Horch," he said simply. "We used what we had or could make. For building materials we took clay from the ground and long, thin shoots from the local vegetation-"
I didn't want to hear it all again, so I took a chance. "Excuse me," I said deferentially, addressing Beert. "The Wet One needs water, so if we may withdraw-?"
The Greatmother answered for him; it was the first time she had spoken to me directly. "Go, go," she said irritably. "But leave food for Djabeertapritch; the poor thing must be hungry."
We all crowded into one of the other rooms, or all but Beert and his personal robot, which remained behind to serve him his meal. I had two things on my mind. For one, I knew I was going to have that little talk with Beert before long, and I wasn't looking forward to it. I was definitely looking forward to the other, though. However much I tried to warn myself that there were many hurdles still to get across, I could almost taste the nearness of my escape to Earth. While Pirraghiz was taking charge of the food we had carried away with us, sniffing and tasting each item, I looked around the room for things that might be useful when I got back. By the time she had approved a few things for my meal, I decided there weren't any. But there might be information worth having.
Pirraghiz handed me a collection of fruits and spoke doubtfully to the amphibian. "I do not know if any of this is suitable for you, Wet One."
The Wet One waved a flipper at her. The robot with the sack of water was carefully spraying his rubbery skin, a squirt at a time, like Spanish peasants taking wine from a goatskin, while a second robot was busy mopping up the droplets that splashed away. The Wet One was wriggling with pleasure as his skin welcomed the damp, but it did not distract him from his purpose. "I do not need to eat now," he grumbled, in that thick, muddy voice. "I will eat well when I have been transmitted to my own planet. When will that happen?"
His bath boy-robot answered him. "The channels are being prepared. The Greatmother will give the order to transmit you when she wishes."
I thought that was a good opportunity to try to get some information, so I interrupted. "Can you tell us what kind of a place we're in?"
The spraying robot did not respond, but the one on mop-up detail stopped what it was doing and extruded a glittering branch of twiglets in my direction. "This is a nest of the Four and Ones, formerly occupied by the Others," it said.
That wasn't informative. I said, "I mean, what is it?" That was no better. The robot stood silent and impassive, only the glittering ball at its top flickering unhelpfully. Pirraghiz sighed, put down the loaf of something she was breaking into pieces for me and issued an order.
"Display the appearance of this artifact we are in," she commanded the Christmas tree.
It worked. The thing immediately went to the video bowl, fussed with the controls for a moment and did as commanded. An image sprang up in the bowl. It was obviously a space station of some kind, but what it looked like was a child's impromptu building-block construction, all jagged angles and bits and pieces tacked on. It gleamed of metal, though not very brightly. At first I thought it was a kind of engineering drawing, since it was displayed against a background of solid black, like the images I'd seen of other species in the helmet.
But then Pirraghiz said, "What are those things?" and I saw that the blackness was not quite complete. It was a sky, and not a kind of sky I had ever seen before. It was certainly nothing like the brilliant globular-cluster display of the prison planet. It wasn't even like a starry night on Earth. There were no stars at all. Instead there was a scattering of fuzzily glowing little scraps of light, hard to make out. Most were white, some bluish, one or two a ruddy orange in color. And apart from them there was nothing but blackness-total, unrelieved, unfriendly blackness.
I had not been in love with an astronomer for nothing. "My God," I said, "those are galaxies!"
Ever since the five of us found ourselves on the prison planet, I had been aware that we were far from home. Not this far, though. Not in intergalactic space! Even the globular cluster of stars that surrounded us could have been somewhere within that fuzzy whirlpool of stars that was our own galaxy, but now-
No. We weren't even that close anymore.
I know it's silly. If we had been close enough to see Earth as a star in the sky, say marooned on the surface of Mars, I still would have had no way of getting to it other than one of these alien transit machines. And with the machines, no distance was really far. Wherever I was, I was as close to home as a single step, no matter how many millions of light-years I had to cross to get there.
All the same, it felt different. It felt frightening.
It wasn't until Pirraghiz touched me on the shoulder that I realized I was still staring at that picture in the bowl. "Are you all right, Dannerman?" she asked anxiously. "You aren't eating."
I looked down at the crinkly pale fruit in my hand, then gave it back to her. "I'm not hungry," I said.
"You should eat," she said, "but if that is not what you want to do just now, perhaps you should go to Beert. Have you forgotten than he wanted to talk to you?"
Well, actually I had, at least for the moment. But it was something that needed to be done, so I headed for the reception room.
I was surprised to find that Beert was still talking; he had just got to the beginnings of the building of the nest and their invention of a kind of paper. And the Greatmother was absorbedly listening still, but when I came in she glanced at me, with the absent look a visitor might give the family cat as it slunk into a room, then shook herself. "I am being selfish, Djabeertapritch," she sighed. "All the nest will want to hear your story. We must have a banquet and sing so that you can teach them what Horch can do, however wretched their circumstances."
"I am honored by your visit, Greatmother," he said,
lowering his head respectfully.
"Yes," she agreed. And as her personal Christmas tree began to bear her away she twisted her neck teasingly and added, "You will enjoy the banquet, Djabeertapritch. We will show you someone you have never seen before."
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The talk with Beert didn't get off to a good start. What was on my mind was why we were so far from anything at all; what was on his was wonder about who this previously unknown "someone" might be. It turned out quickly that he couldn't answer my question, and naturally I hadn't a clue about his. So we got serious. I said, "I'm sorry if I got you in trouble, Beert."
He gave me one of those nose-to-nose looks for a moment, then pulled away. "You should not have destroyed one of the cousins' machines," he said, sorrowfully judicious. "The rest is my fault. Now show me what you have in that bag."
He caught me by surprise that time, but I sighed and retrieved the bag. There are times when you just have to throw in your hand and take what's coming to you.
When I loosened the drawstring and shook it gently, its contents spilled out: all the little odds and ends of Horchware that I had surreptitiously filled it with, tools stolen from Beert's laboratory, a batch of Pirraghiz's tapes and the ones I had taken from the room here. I had been careful when I opened it, but the things began to fly around the room. I caught as many as I could, and Beert reached out for others. He stared at the first one that came his way, a black oblong with rows of dimples along its side. "This is mine!" he said. I didn't answer, and he darted his head toward me. "You took it from my workshop!" I didn't say anything to that, either. I was busy cramming the loose items back in the bag. Beert didn't stop me. He even handed a couple of them back to me, but he wasn't meeting my eyes anymore. When I had everything stowed away again I cleared my throat.
"I didn't want to tell you about these things," I said.
"No, you would not," he agreed. "These are Horch technology! They came from the cousins. I did not think you would try to take such things with you. I do not think my Greatmother would approve."
I said miserably, "I didn't like doing it, Beert, but what choice did I have? Do you remember what you said? That in my place you would fear the cousin Horch as much as the Others? Well, I do!"
Beert gave me a look I couldn't read, then turned away. Well, "twisted away" is a better way to put it. He corkscrewed his neck around itself until it came to rest with his chin on his shoulder, or what would have been his shoulder if he'd had one, looking away from me. "I need to think," he said. "Leave me, Dan."
And I did.
Pirraghiz insisted that I eat, so I did.
Then she urged me to sleep, because there was no knowing when I might get the chance again, so I tried to do that, too. Sleep didn't come quickly, though. What made it difficult was my conscience.
The difficulty was that although this Beert was a weird-looking creature with a snaky neck and the face of a rattlesnake- not to mention that he was also a member of that race who had just finished murdering a whole bunch of my fellow humans, one of whom (or several of whom) had been me-in spite of all that, he was something else. He was one of the only two friends I had left, anywhere in this part of the universe. And I had put him in the deep shit, and had every prospect of getting him in deeper still.
You might ask how I could do something like that to a friend.
I guess the only proper answer would be "practice," because actually I had had plenty of experience along those lines. Betraying friends was basically the job description of what I did for the National Bureau of Investigation. We called it "infiltration." In order to get the goods on some gang of criminals or terrorists- or whatever-my first step was to make some new friends, who would remain my friends just as long as it took me to get the evidence that would put them in prison for most of their adult lives.
I had never had much of a problem with my conscience in those days, because those "friends" weren't friends at all. They were bad guys, and they needed to be put away. But Beert wasn't a bad guy. Neither was my other new friend, Pirraghiz. And I was definitely screwing up her life, too.
So I didn't get much sleep, hanging on to the webbing in my alien room in this alien thing called a "nexus." Neither did anyone else, because it wasn't long until one of the Christmas trees poked in on me and announced, "The channels for the Wet One have been accessed. It may proceed now to its transmission."
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I don't know if Beert had slept, either. When I got to where the Wet One was, Beert was there, too, painstakingly reattaching all the amphibian's gear to his body, but he didn't speak to me.
He didn't speak on the way back to the transit-machine chamber, either. The trip seemed shorter than it had coming the other way, maybe because my mind wasn't on what we were doing. What my mind was occupied with was wondering what Beert's mind was. I knew he was feeling guilty. I didn't know what he would do about it. If duty overcame friendship, he only had to speak a couple of words and my hopes of ever getting back to Earth would be right down the tube. Or if he dithered indecisively for very long, that would be nearly as bad. What I wanted was to be on my way before it occurred to anybody to put in a call to the Eight Plus Threes.
A couple of the Christmas trees were waiting for us at the transit machine. So was a living Horch-a very young Horch, I thought, because he was no more than half Beert's size, but handsomely decked out in a scaled-down version of his Greatmother's body armor. "I am Kofeeshtetch," he said-or something like that. He was talking to Beert, but his neck was swaying toward me and the Wet One. "I am the Greatmother's least grandson. Can these organisms talk?"
Kofeeshtetch turned out to be pretty nearly the best thing that had happened to me in a while. He was a pampered, and fairly well spoiled, youngster, and that was very good for us lower organisms. He wasn't just interested in us, he was fascinated. He was even more fascinated-no, the right word is "thrilled," thrilled enough to be peeing his pants if he'd had any-at what we two aborigines were planning to do. Invade strongholds of the Others! Do it single-handed! "When I myself am grown," he boasted breathlessly, "I too will command forces to capture stations and worlds from the Others, just as my parents did in this installation! But I will not, of course, be foolish enough to attempt it alone. Do you imagine that you have any hope of succeeding at all?"
I wasn't sure whether he was asking the Wet One or me, but I wanted to be the one who answered. "With the generous help of you Horch, yes!" I said.
Beert gave me a disapproving look, translated as Shut up, you 've made enough trouble. "It is kind of you to take an interest, Kofeeshtetch," he said, doing his best to be polite to a grandson of a Greatmother, "but we have urgent business. This Wet One is most uncomfortable in this dry and weightless environment. He should begin his mission without delay."
The youth shrugged impatiently. "Of course, but first I wish to hear his plans in detail. Speak to me if you can, Wet One."
The amphibian's little electric whiskers were twisting about. For a moment I thought the Greatmother's least grandson was going to get a cattle-prod shock to hurry him along, but courtesy, and prudence, won out. The Wet One began telling his plans in his thick, slobbery voice.
Kofeeshtetch listened with a lot less courtesy, his neck drawn back from the Wet One in repugnance. "I can hardly understand this one," he remarked to Beert. "He speaks very poorly, as do you. I am disappointed." He turned to the nearest Christmas tree. "At least display for me what his planet looks like, also"-shooting one arm in my direction-"the planet of this one."
"We have not yet identified the other organism's home," the machine apologized.
"Do so! Meanwhile, the display!"
There was no doubt that Kofeeshtetch was used to having his orders obeyed. They were. Another of the Christmas trees, the one hovering by the transit machine, quickly swung itself to a TV bowl in the wall and made adjustments.
As a picture sprang up in the bowl, the amphibian caught his breath in a sort of l
oud, abbreviated snore. To me, the picture was just a planet, and not a particularly interesting one. None of its few land masses looked anything like Earth, but it meant something to the amphibian. He croaked, "That is it! I believe that is my true Home Water!"
One of his shocking tendrils was resting on the image, touching a wide bay that looked like any other wide bay to me. It didn't seem to mean much to Kofeeshtetch, either. As he pulled himself closer, one of those mean-looking fighting machines got in his way, but he shoved it rudely aside. Then he made a sound of disgust. "This is a very tedious object, Wet One," he told the amphibian. "There is too much water. But if you wish to go there, then do so."
And he waved to the Christmas tree, who opened the door of the transit machine.
The amphibian crawled in, attachments and all, and the other robot tossed his ammunition boxes after him.
The door closed.
Kofeeshtetch made a gesture of dismissal. "I do not think that Wet One will survive for long," he remarked, and that was all there was to it.
After a moment Beert sighed. "I would have liked to wish him well on his venture," he said meditatively. "In any case, thank you for your help, Kofeeshtetch, but now I am quite tired. I think I will go to my chamber and rest before the banquet. Are you coming, Dan?"
I looked at the young Horch. He seemed poutily disappointed in the entertainment, but he hadn't left.
"You go ahead, Beert," I said. "I think Kofeeshtetch still has some questions for me, so I'll stay a bit."
It took me about thirty seconds to get the kid juiced up again-he was, after all, a kid. All I had to do was to ask him if he would please grant me the favor of telling me how his ancestors had captured this installation. That did it. He was off, and then all I had to do was make the appropriate thrilled noises from time to time.
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