Once she’d made contact and given their position, she verbally disengaged the communicator built into her helmet and returned her attention to her catatonic charge.
“You wanted to see combat. Why didn’t you stay home? Patrol your gardens and listen to your cantatas? But no. You had to stick your beak where it didn’t belong, where it’s not historically or culturally designed to go. Next time listen to Nature. You’re not made for this.” A long-range enemy shot snapped a nearby tree in half ten meters above the ground. Umeki eyed the smoking bole casually.
“I’m wasting my time here with you, you know that? Babysitting an alien academic when I should be doing something useful and constructive … like killing Mazvec.”
She awoke to a pale green sky and walls dense with holoed flowers. Someone had improvised a traditional heavily padded nest in the midst of a large bed designed to comfort a different kind of body. Sheets were piled around her, supporting her weakened form in a correct upright position, legs carefully folded underneath her abdomen. She straightened her neck, bringing her head off her back where it had been resting in the feathers between her folded wings, and surveyed her surroundings. Trouble had been taken to insure her comfort.
“Good to see you awake.” Umeki stood near a chair. “I was told you’ve been showing signs of coming around.”
Memories came flooding back to Lalelelang, and with them the trembling. But the room was quiet, the sight of the lightly ruffled flowers soothing. She recalled her training and steadied herself. Her eyebrows flexed decorously.
“I remember now. Everything. I fear I have become the vessel for more apologies than I can adequately convey.” She concluded with an elaborate trill, a kind of running whistle with three distinct glottal stops. Tradition demanded it even though Lalelelang knew it would mean little to the Human female who stood before her.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” Umeki replied with straightforward superficiality. “It wasn’t like you asked to be attacked.”
Lalelelang studied the guide. The transformation was remarkable, as if when putting off her armor Umeki had simultaneously doffed an attitude. She no longer looked threatening and deadly, as she had out in the field. Now she was no more than a flat-faced, clumsy primate waiting dumbly for conversation to resume.
What a species, Lalelelang thought.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” the guide ventured unnecessarily.
“I know.” There was a great tiredness in her. “How long?”
“Couple of days. You scared the hell out of me out there. My career could’ve died with you.”
What a primitive, adamantly impolitic thing to say, Lalelelang mused. No doubt another Human would have thought it reasonable, perhaps even amusing. Naturally she did not comment.
“But you’re okay, so no harm done.” Umeki smiled, displaying sharp incisors and canines. It did not last long, for which Lalelelang was grateful. “You’re not, uh, thinking of going back out again, are you?”
“I think I’ve gained enough firsthand information for a while.”
The human relaxed visibly, laughing softly. “You Wais. Always understanding.”
“What about my recorder?” she asked suddenly.
“In better shape than you.” Umeki gestured toward a cabinet. “It’s in there, with the rest of your gear. You’ll have some interesting images to relive. You’ll be going home now, I presume?” Her tone was ripe with expectation.
“I imagine so. I hope my leaving early will not displease you?”
“Do you expect me to lie? You’d see through it anyway. You people master languages too well.” She turned to the door. “There’s someone who wants to say good-bye. He doesn’t have much time … not that I think the two of you would miss the opportunity for lengthy conversation.”
She opened the door and spoke to someone out of Lalelelang’s range of vision. A moment later the portal opened wider to admit the soldier who’d saved her. He looked just as massive in his duty uniform as he had in armor.
Reciting silently and rapidly kept her from shaking.
Now that circumstances were different she was able to view him in light of numerous studies and saw that he was no more than slightly above average in height and mass for a Human male. He towered over her as he approached the bed. This time she did not flinch.
There was contrition in his voice. “They tell me my appearance upset you pretty bad I didn’t mean for it to.”
“You saved my life.” Lalelelang spoke rapidly, trying to forestall any additional embarrassment on the soldier’s part. Most Humans had only their inadequate words with which to try and elucidate interpersonal relationships. Under such primitive conditions it was a wonder any matings at all survived long enough to produce offspring.
She forced herself to extend the tips of her right wing. Surprised, the Human reached out to grip them in his powerful fingers. She tensed, but he was careful and did not bruise her.
The hand withdrew.
“I just wanted to say that I’m glad you’re feeling better.” The soldier held his duty cap in his other fingers. As she watched, he latched onto it with his second hand and began kneading it absently, as if he didn’t know what to do with his limbs. This kind of undirected motor activity was quite common among Humans. “The lieutenant told me that you’re some kind of professor and that you’re studying us.” He smiled almost shyly. “I wouldn’t want to think that you’d got some kind of wrong impression from me.”
“Actually I am a historian and no, the impression you gave me was … no more than what I expected.”
He seemed relieved. “Glad to hear it. Hey, I guess this means I’m gonna be in a history book or something, right?”
“Or something,” she murmured noncommittally.
“My name’s Kuzca.” He whispered the name, as if delivering himself of some confidential information of consequence. “K-u … I guess you being a Wais, you won’t have any trouble with the spelling.”
“I do not think so.”
“Michael Kuzca. Homeworld’s Tokugawa Four.”
“I will remember. I have a good memory for names.”
“Better than me, I’m sure. I’m just a grunt.” Lalelelang recognized the application of an ancient term Human soldiers liked to apply to themselves. Its true meaning was difficult to divine, overlain as it was with the conflagrative psychosocial detritus of thousands of years of unrelenting warfare.
“You take it easy now. You canar … you Wais don’t heal so fast.”
“No,” she murmured. “We do not have your recuperative powers. But then, neither does any other intelligent species.”
He left with a parting wave of one huge hand, an ineloquent but nonetheless affecting gesture … in its crude, primitive fashion.
“He didn’t want you to leave with the wrong impression.” Umeki approached the bed-nest. “Because of the special circumstances he was able to get leave long enough to look in on you.”
“I am touched. Where he is going now?”
“To rejoin his unit. Back to the fighting.”
“Of course,” Lalelelang murmured. “Where he will be happy.”
Umeki studied with interest the makeshift nest in the center of the bed. “You’re pretty exceptional, to have survived what you went through. Any other Wais would still be catatonic. Maybe never come out of it.”
Lalelelang shifted her body into a more comfortable position. “I have made this my area of expertise for many years. And I have developed my own training exercises, both physical and mental, to enable me to cope with extremes.”
“Still.” Umeki was silent for a moment. “I may or may not have the chance to talk to you again before you’re taken to your shuttle. I just want to say that I hope you got what you came for.”
“More than I hoped for in my dreams.”
“I’ll bet.” Umeki chuckled softly to herself as she moved away from the bed. Halfway to the door she turned to bow slightly in its direction.
> “I am not familiar with your gesture in the context of our present situation.”
“It’s tribal instead of species-specific,” Umeki explained. “A gesture of respect among my familial ancestors. A lot of them were fighters and would have understood.”
“All of your ancestors were fighters,” Lalelelang responded. “That is something that is species-specific.”
“Well, I guess what I meant to say was that a lot of them were professional soldiers.”
Lalelelang acknowledged the correction with a gesture. There was much more she could have said, could have discussed with this useful Human, but she was too tired, exhausted in both mind and body.
She was ready to leave, yes. Ready to return to the peace and sophistication and familiar surroundings of Mahmahar. For all that, a perverse, irrational part of her was ready to do it all over again.
The difference between dedication and fanaticism, she reminded herself, is measurable as the diameter of one’s pupils. She did not ask for a mirror.
She feigned sleep but kept one eye half-open until the Human officer had departed. Guide and savior Umeki might be, but she was still Human, and Lalelelang could not relax until she was once again alone in the room. Her caution caused her no guilt. You couldn’t trust a Human, not even those who seemed completely reliable.
How could you, when for the entire stretch of their recorded history they’d been unable to trust themselves?
No fanfares, no celebrations stood poised to acknowledge her return home. Nor would she have responded favorably to any such overtly tasteless display. Not that she was ostracized. As a representative of her species to have actually experienced combat her status was unique. This meant that a special social subniche had to be created for her, with the result that she was simultaneously sought out and ignored.
This did not trouble her. She’d always been something of a loner, even within the requisite sisters triad to which she belonged. Her triad siblings were at once regretful that she participated in so few social gatherings and proud of her accomplishments. Lalelelang hoped they balanced out.
One immediate result of her expedition was that attendance at her presentations tripled in numbers if not enthusiasm. As the novelty of her journey faded, so did attendance. She thought this as inevitable as she did amusing, realizing that many of the newcomers were driven by perverse curiosity rather than serious scholarship. Yet not even the dilettantes could help but depart enriched.
It did not trouble her, since research and publication rather than education had become her primary focus. Fortuitously, this coincided with the administration’s goals. Anyone could teach, but the experiences on which she alone could expatiate were singular and deserving of a wider audience.
By virtue of a single journey she had become the leading expert in her field.
There existed a small coterie of specialists with whom she regularly exchanged information: Hivistahm and O’o’yan and one Yula, as well as fellow Wais. Many shared her concerns, though none were as yet sufficiently bold or committed to subscribe to her most radical hypotheses. Lalelelang knew she at times entered dangerous theoretical ground: places where even brilliant fellow academics feared to tread. Her report on “Irreversible Bloodlust in Traditional Entertainment,” for example, was not merely controversial but simply beyond the realm of comprehensibility for many scholars. They tended to try and deal with such propositions in the abstract, which correspondingly reduced the effectiveness of her formulations.
Lalelelang was working from a historian’s viewpoint toward a comprehensive theory of Human behavior, and many of her colleagues and contacts did not much care for the direction she was taking. This she could not help. As a dedicated empiricist she had no choice but to plunge helplessly on down the path she had chosen.
The deeper she delved and the harder she studied the more she was convinced she was on to something of critical importance not only to her own people but to the entire Weave. Something so obvious and yet so elusive that the rest of the Weave had elected to overlook it rather than probe too deeply.
Another combat experience might have crystallized everything, but she wasn’t ready for that. The memories of her previous encounter with the battlefield were still too fresh, too readily brought to mind. She briefly considered actually applying to visit the speciocentrically named Earth, but decided there were limits to what even she, with her specialized training and experience, could stand. The thought of being isolated on an entire world full of Humans, all of whom were potentially unstable, and where she would invariably become an object of curiosity and attention, was sufficiently daunting even in the abstract to kill the notion aborning. She felt herself beginning to tremble whenever she considered it and hastened to recite a calming mnemonic.
She was convinced she needed to further observe Human soldiers, preferably in more intimate circumstances, but was not prepared again to go through the suffering she’d experienced on Tiofa. By now her academic reputation was such that she could make use of proportionate funds without having to go through administration.
What were her alternatives?
Ideally she should attach herself to one of the primates as closely as possible in order to make the exhaustive observations she felt her ongoing work required. Much of the difficulty would lie in finding a Human soldier willing to put up with a Wais underfoot while it went about its waking activities. Her brief interaction with the Human Umeki had hinted at the difficulty of establishing such a relationship.
She felt it was something she had to do, that she could not fully know or understand the species until she had lived with one of them, shared its daily experiences, observed how it interacted not only with representatives of other species but with its own kind. It meant not only putting her proposal before administration but personally applying to Human authority. Her experiences on Tiofa should count for something with the latter.
They would be concerned that she not inhibit the combat readiness of whomever she was attached to. She doubted that was anything to worry about. Among all the intelligent species only a Human could peacefully discuss dance, or cooking, or luminescence sculpture, and at an instant’s notice be ready to fight and kill. The presence of a single Wais in such company was unlikely to cause much in the way of interference.
If she was fortunate, she might make contact with a soldier conversant with Wais as well as Weave culture. It would make her work much easier, not to mention more comfortable, if all the requisite cultural condescension did not devolve upon her. Yet, if necessary, she was prepared to deal even with that.
She framed her proposal carefully. There was a good chance the preparation would be wasted and all would come to nothing. After all, what Human soldier would want to have a Wais, traditionally ready to go unpredictably comatose or spasmodic at the first difficult moment, for company while it was trying to carry out its assigned duties?
Excitement and apprehension followed the dissemination of her application. In many ways this was more extreme than her request to visit a battlefield. She was applying not merely to observe but for an extended period of interspecies cohabitation—with a Human soldier, no less.
She knew that she had to try. For the sake of critical theories not proven fact as well as for personal feelings that ran deeper still, to the core of what she believed, she had to try. In so doing she hoped for revelation, but was willing to settle for understanding.
Among the Wais there were few as powerfully driven by their convictions.
What she wanted more than anything else, of course, was for experience and study to prove her wrong. If she was right, then the occupation of future historians would be simply as annotators of footnotes to the potential cataclysm only she seemed able to see. Barring the triumph of the Amplitur and their Purpose, of course, in which case all history would become, in the grip of that singular race, merely another of their manifold clever fictions.
What truly terrified her was that the steadier the edifice of her prin
ciple theory became, the less sure she was that an Amplitur victory would be the greater of the two evils.
V
Straat-ien and his beloved drifted in a blue mist softly illuminated by stars flung like glitter across a palette of black velvet. About them puffy white cumulus clouds floated: ambient cotton. In the distance lay rugged mountains decked out in brown and green and capped with brighter white, a more intense absence of color.
Proximate details were easier to resolve. Strange trees and vines bound the land together in a vibrant network of intertwined life. Harmless huge insects drifted among the vines on iridescent wings that were shards of soap bubble. They scattered on languorous hums as the nearly nude couple drifted down through them.
At precisely the right moment the man and woman came to placid rest on a beach of ruby sand that had been formed by millions of years of wave action on a shelf of solid corundum. A translucent emerald sea sang joyously against the reef just offshore as they consummated their journey.
Afterward they rolled onto their backs, the woman’s fingers lightly gripping the man’s wrist. Naomi inclined her eyes to her companion. Sweat lightly beaded her forehead, and her pale blond hair formed golden veins against the deep red sand. She smiled.
“You’ve got to hand it to the Hivistahm. For a race whose lovemaking is pretty damn prosaic they really know how to create a dazzling enviromood for us nonreptilians.”
Nevan Straat-ien saw no reason to disagree as he lay on his back searching the simulated sky. It was a perfect sky, devoid of pollution, speckled with just the right number and kind of clouds. Exactly as had been requested. The rate of their imaginary descent to the beach had been controlled by their respective degrees of arousal, all monitored by the Hivistahm’s remote foreplay software, everything combining to insure that they landed on the opulent sands at the truly perfect moment.