“You may not have to.” Yirunta stepped between the brothers. “In any case, restrain your play, please. The situation is serious.”
“You could fool me.” Kerwin was looking toward the curving port. “How the hell are you supposed to tell this is serious?”
“Ganun said so. Ganun does not overstate.”
“Don’t worry.” Miranda smiled down at Seeth.
“I ain’t worried. We’ll make spacedust out of ‘em, whoever ‘em turns out to be.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean your name. I think Seth is kinda classy.”
“You do? No shit?”
“Sure. I mean, like, that’s a real solid old-timey American name. Real frontiersy-like. Cute. Sociologically rad.”
She sighed. “I mean, these days every guy thinks he’s cool if he’s named Jake or Jules or Brock or Matt, or something like that. There’s no warmth in those names, no naturalness. It’s like, you know, they think they’re engraved in granite or something.” She got a dreamy look in her eyes. “I’ve always fantasized about meeting a real guy. Somebody named Ezra or Isaiah or like that.”
What Seeth said was, “No kidding?” What his eyes said were, “Man, this chick is weird.” What he said next, still not quite sure if she was putting him on, was, “My uncle raised hogs, too.”
“For real?” Miranda’s eyes got very wide. She knelt down on the carpet next to his chair and leaned one arm close to his. “For sure? That’s just the ultimate to the max. Like, he actually slopped the pigs and dug up the ground and all that real organic stuff?”
“Uh, yeah, organic, right.” Seeth wore the expression of a casual traveler who’d unexpectedly stumbled across the trail that led to the pot of gold but still wasn’t sure of the signs. “And, uh, we were real close, too, Uncle Seth and me.”
Kerwin glared down at him. “That’s funny. I seem to remember you saying Uncle Seth was the only person you ever knew who made a profession out of shoveling pig—“
“Shut up, man! I mean it, shut it down!” He smiled warmly back at Miranda. “Like I was saying, cinnamonlips, that’s why I was named after him.”
“A farmer.” The dreamy expression deepened. “I mean, that’s like so, you know, so real.”
“Right, real. Can you hear me okay? I mean, it’s kinda noisy in here bein’ on a war footing and all. Ice cubes clinking and video players going. Come a little closer and I’ll tell you all about Iowa.”
Miranda settled into the chair next to him. There was enough space to accommodate them both, but not so much that Seeth’s blood pressure didn’t start rising toward triple digits. The fact that they might be annihilated at any moment by a still unrevealed enemy didn’t seem to be bothering either of them in the slightest.
It was too much for Kerwin, who turned away and headed toward Ganun’s command chair. Surely she was putting all of them on. All this breathless mooing over realness and fertilizer and farm dirt didn’t go with the twisted, silvery, off-the-shoulder alien gown she was wearing, or the air-repulsion shoes that enabled her to glide along a hundredth of an inch above the carpet, or the necklace that instead of falling from her neck climbed in a series of tiered rainbows to form a sweeping arc slightly to the left of her head, which rose and fell according to her mood, which perfectly set off her...
He forced himself to focus on the Captain, who was sprawled with his legs across one arm of his command chair, munching on something sweet while gazing at the small viewer that extended from one arm of the chair on a flexible tube. Yirunta and Rail were already standing nearby.
“Good,” the Captain commented on seeing Kerwin. “Where are your companions?”
“Otherwise occupied,” he confessed reluctantly.
“Well, you can convey the necessary information to them. Briefly, we find ourselves in a very dangerous situation here.” He popped a few more pieces of whatever he was snacking on into his wide mouth.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Kerwin muttered. “I just don’t understand your attitude.”
Enormous brows knit together. “Attitude? What’s wrong with our attitude?”
“I just mean it doesn’t look like you’re getting ready to fight anybody.”
“We’re not getting ready to fight. We’re fighting already.”
Kerwin glanced toward the viewport. “I don’t see any maneuvering ships. I don’t see any laser beams or missiles being fired. I don’t see any explosions. And this doesn’t look like a war room.”
“Gracious me, I don’t see your problem, young cousin. Everyone is at their station doing their job.” Realization struck him. “Oh, now I understand. You’re talking about a primitive conflict where you actually see your opponent and attack him physically.”
“Isn’t that the way it’s usually done?” Kerwin responded confusedly.
“Heavens no. Not in deep space. We’re talking about individual vessels that are traveling at speeds measured in light minutes. Not only can you not see your opponent, but even if you possessed the fastest biological components in existence and fired a weapon that traveled at the speed of light he would have moved a million amrits by the time your beam reached the place where he’d been. Interstellar battles are far too complex to leave to mere organics like you and me. It’s strictly the province of machines.”
“Our computer against their computer,” Rail added for good measure.
“I see. The computers figure out when you’re going to be in position to shoot and then you fire based on their predictions.”
“No, no, no. Goodness no. You don’t understand at all.” Ganun turned in his chair, setting his drink aside. “We are trying to travel from point A to point B. Our pursuers seek to prevent this. They instruct their battle computers accordingly. Our computer then tries to predict what their computer is going to do and programs our evasive action in turn. Instead of a highly wasteful exchange of destructive energy the actual conflict becomes, well, a sort of stately dance across the firmament. No shots are fired.
“Eventually one vessel secures a superior tactical position over its opponent.”
“Then you open fire,” Kerwin said.
Ganun was shaking his head sadly. “No conception of what modern warfare is about, absolutely none.”
“Go easy on him,” Rail advised. “Remember, they still employ hand-to-hand combat on his world.”
“Yes, I’d forgotten.” The Captain looked up at Kerwin. “Before anyone can fire, the respective battle computers have analyzed tactical position, ship size, armament, likely crew levels, and a thousand other factors. They get in touch with each other and exchange this information. If our pursuers earn the superior rating, we’ll surrender. If not, we’ll escape. No need for actual death and destruction.”
“What kind of battle is that?”
“A civilized, practical, and economical one That’s the trouble with conflicts among you primitive types: messy and wasteful.” He took a sip of his drink. “So there’s really no reason to let your blood pressure rise. There’s not going to be any shooting. Oh, it happens once in a while, when the opposing predictions are too close to be decided sensibly. But that’s rare.”
“What if the pursuing ship gets the upper hand and decides to go ahead and blow you out of existence?”
“Nothing we could do to prevent it. But that’s not the way things are done. You see, if it was found out such a thing had happened, we might blow one of their ships out of existence next time. Nobody, not even the Oomemians, goes around blowing up ships that have already surrendered. Interstellar craft are expensive.”
“What about people doing it for the personal satisfaction of seeing their enemies go up in smoke?”
Ganun smiled and wagged a finger at him. “Don’t impose your own sociocultural aberrations on advanced peoples. What you refer to is strictly a primitive pleasure. We may not have outgrown conflict, but we’ve certainly gained control of our adrenal glands.”
“So if whoever’s chasing us w
ins this battle of computer number-crunching...?”
Ganun shrugged. “We slow down and turn you and your friends and this Izmir thing over to them.” He frowned, surveyed the war room. “Speaking of which, where is our precious freak of nature?”
Kerwin found the telltale blue eye up among the floating lights, pointed.
“Oh yes,” said Ganun, “I see it now. Anyway, that is how this will be decided. Hopefully it will be our computer that will prevail. We have the advantage of a head start and a good ship.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Rail muttered. “It has to be the Oomemians. They’ve managed to follow me to every world I’ve visited.”
A subaltern approached, handed the Captain a printout. Ganun’s eyes roved over the script. When he had finished he looked up grimly.
“I’m afraid this time you’re wrong, old friend. It’s not the Oomemians who’re after us. We are being pursued by Prufillians.”
Rail’s three eyes widened to the point where they seemed to occupy most of his face. “Then why do we continue to run? Those are my people.”
“Don’t forget the deal we made.” Ganun spoke evenly, unemotionally. “Izmir is to be studied near House by human scientists. That was the bargain. We were to save you from the Oomemians. That we’ve done.”
“Yes, I know that, of course.” Rail’s unease was understandable, Kerwin thought. “But I made the agreement on the assumption that we wouldn’t be able to escape the Oomemians any other way. That doesn’t mean we have to fight my own people.”
“We’re already fighting them, as I’ve just finished explaining to my young cousin here. Both battle systems have been engaged for several hours.” He glanced down at the printout. “I could just as easily have kept this information from you, remember, and told you it was the Oomemians who were after us. Yet I chose to tell you the truth. I felt you had a moral right to know.”
“Well, I appreciate am grateful for that, certainly, but—“
Kerwin interrupted the distraught Prufillian. “What about our moral rights? We don’t give a damn who puts Izmir under the magnifying glass; you, the Oomemians, or Arthwit’s people. We just want to go home and mind our own business. It’s been bad enough being caught in the middle of one interstellar conflict. We don’t want to be in on the beginning of another.”
“You have my sympathy, goodness knows,” Ganun murmured apologetically. “You’ve placed yourselves in an awkward position and don’t know how to extricate yourself from it. Unfortunately, at this point in time there is nothing I can do. Were I to interfere with the work of the battle computers it is highly likely we would quickly lose the fight. That would mean turning all of you over to Prufillia. I don’t want to do that.”
“But what about me?” Rail looked utterly lost. “If you do lose the contest and they find me on your ship, they’ll carbonize me as a traitor. Ganun, you can’t do this! I risked my life for almost a year on behalf of my people, but they won’t believe that if they find me on a human ship they’ve been forced to war track.”
“Oh, piffle! Don’t get so emotional. You sound like one of these Cro-Magnons. You are my guests. Guests can become prisoners with a twist of a syllable. If we lose I assure you I’ll make it a point to inform the Prufillian officers that you’re here against your will.” He glanced up at Kerwin. “All of you. So you see, you’ve nothing to lose. Whether we lose or win this fight you’ll be treated as heroes by the victorious side.”
“Well—that makes sense. I feel better. Thank you.”
“Mention it not. By the way, there appears to be more than one vessel engaged in pursuit. Considerably more, though we’ve no precise count as yet. More seem to be arriving all the time.” He shook his head unhappily. “It seems your people received word you were in this region and decided to come looking for you. You may get your wish to rejoin them.
“As for you, young human, it may be that you will get your wish and that the predictions will be close enough to require actual combat. Then you will see all the pretty explosions and flashes of light and blood and gore your race is so fond of.”
“You’ve got me all wrong. We don’t like war at all. We hate combat. It’s just that we can’t seem to settle our problems any other way, sometimes.”
“Dervil drap,” said Ganun curtly. “Truth is truth and fact is fact and nature is nature and you can’t help what you are, so why try to deny it? Anyway, it probably will not come to that.”
“If it does,” Kerwin inquired, “you’ll move to a real war room?”
Ganun was starting to sound bored with these stupid questions. “For the last time, cousin, this is the war room. You don’t really think we’d entrust the operation of immensely powerful transspatial weapons to our own ridiculously slow reactions, do you? If it comes to actual fighting, the computers will operate our combat systems as well.”
“All I can say is that it’s a damn funny way to fight a war.”
“You Cro-Magnons.” Ganun looked sympathetic. “Everything has to be a hands-on experience with you, doesn’t it? You don’t even know how to relax when you’re fighting.”
The subaltern returned to hand the Captain what looked like a stick of cherry chewing gum. Instead of placing it in his mouth, Ganun slipped it into a small tube set into the side of his chair. The stick vanished. A holographic sphere instantly appeared in the air in front of his legs. It was alive with dots and lines and ciphered symbology that would have made Kerwin gasp in wonder if he hadn’t encountered dozens of similar hallucinations during the past couple of days.
Ganun studied the sphere, rotating it slowly. “Well, things are getting complicated.” He didn’t sound especially upset. This projection was far more sophisticated than those Kerwin and his friends had previously encountered, as the Captain proceeded to demonstrate.
He stuck one thick finger into the drifting mass of stars, and must have made contact with something within, because the view immediately zoomed in on one small spherical section, although the outer sphere remained the same size. Now the globe contained only a few stars. Moving among them were tiny glowing pinpoints of light. Ganun’s finger touched one. It brightened briefly.
“That’s us.” His finger retreated to the edge of the sphere, though still not far enough for Kerwin’s taste. “Here come your friends and relations,” he told Rail.
The Prufillian’s jaw dropped as he counted twelve, thirteen... “There must be two dozen ships.”
“Must be.” Ganun was nodding sagely.
“But that’s a full fleet. How did they muster a fleet so quickly in this region?”
“Obviously, your own people want this Izmir as badly as do the Oomemians.”
“They’re close. Too close. You won’t be able to get away. Why not surrender now and eliminate the possibility of armed conflict?”
“I would, except that the situation is not that simple. Notice here.” He moved his fingers within the sphere again. The field of view expanded slightly.
A swarm of dots were beginning to enter the projection near its northern axis. “Oomemians,” the Captain explained unnecessarily. “Quite a few Oomemians. They followed us, as you surmised they might. They just took a little longer closing from a different direction. Our computers must find this interesting. Three-way battles are rare.”
Kerwin stared into the sphere, fascinated by the moving dots. “Won’t the Prufillians and the Oomemians fight each other and allow us to get away?”
“Don’t be naive, cousin. Excuse me, perhaps I am being unfair. It’s unlikely you are compelled to consider the ramifications posed by an interstellar battle in and out of slipspace more than occasionally.”
“Actually, anything more complicated than algebra makes my head swim. Seeth was the one who was good in math, though he’d die before admitting it.”
“Regardless, you must see the complications. The Oomemian computers must decide not only whether they can overtake and defeat us, but if they ca
n do so without being destroyed by the Prafillians, who have the same problem. It will take even advanced computers some time to compute all the possibilities and render decisions. Meanwhile, we can relax and be grateful.”
“Why?”
“Because this will delay both fleets. In the interim we may draw near enough to House for them to send some ships to our defense. I don’t believe either the Prufillians or Oomemians would enter House-controlled space, if only because we could bring more firepower to bear close to home.”
“You’re thinking logically. Don’t,” Rail warned him. “This isn’t your usual free-space confrontation. Izmir scrambles the equations. Both sides want him too badly. Someone might do something crazy, like override the recommendations of their computers. They might try shooting anyway anyhow.”
All eyes turned to the Astarach, who drifted among the illumination globes trilling atonal nonsense, blissfully indifferent to the fact that three major lifeforms were mobilizing awesome forces in an attempt to gain possession of him.
“Wait, I have an idea!” Kerwin looked from Ganun to Rail excitedly. “Why don’t we just tell everybody that Izmir belongs to us and that we’re taking him back to Earth?”
“Because no one will pay any attention to you, young cousin, including me. In this matter, Earth and its desires count for very little.”
Kerwin tried not to appear crushed. “It was just an idea.” He looked across the room to where Seeth and Miranda were engaged in deep conversation: as deep as Miranda ever got, anyway. Seeth was doing most of the talking. Kerwin raised his voice.
“Hey! Don’t you guys wanna know what’s going on?”
Seeth barely looked in his direction. “Naw! You take care of it, brother. Keep me posted. If we ain’t gonna be obliterated in the next ten minutes quit bothering me, okay?”
Izmir drifted across the ceiling, a collection of glassy, glowing bubbles. As those below looked on, the bubbles coalesced into a solid sphere with the blue eye prominent on one side.
“Remarkable,” Ganun observed quietly. “The shape-changing ability, the levitation and heatless defiance of shoot fields, these enormous yet weak pulses of radiation—there are secrets behind that blue eye, gentlemen, secrets. I