in0 (39 page)

“Nothing. I have never encountered them.”

“Not even a hint?” the questioner asked.

The alien shrugged. “The Sovereignty is a large place. It is impossible for any single entity to know all of the species and worlds the Broa control.”

A tall woman stood up in the third row. “And what of the Broa? How many are liable to be in the Orpheus System?”

Sar-Say thought for long seconds, and then replied, “If there are any Broa in residence, they will likely be few in number. The system appears to be a marginal one with but a single stargate. It cannot be very important to the Broa.”

The questions continued for another fifteen minutes, but eventually they dribbled away to nothing.

Sar-Say returned to his seat and Dan Landon stepped up to the podium. He seemed none-the-worse for having sat through the technical jargon and densely packed graphs and tables.

“I think all of you will agree that we have a potentially viable target here, people. The question is whether we go for Orpheus or we wait patiently for another jump wave to transit this system. I want your working group recommendations by this time tomorrow. In the meantime, get some lunch, use the facilities, gossip. Just make sure that you are in your working groups by 15:00 hours so we can give the problem a thorough evaluation.

“Dismissed!”

#

Three days later, Lisa Arden hurried through the rock tunnel toward the main airlock and the last shuttle before the
Ruptured Whale
left orbit. Sar-Say was already aboard, along with the rest of the starship’s crew. Lisa had stayed behind to help with the anthropology working group’s final report on social mores among the Orpheans. She had nearly stayed too long.

While physical data and language studies were important, knowing the Orpheans’ customs would be crucial if they were to keep news of their impending visit from reaching the Broa. Social interactions among humans were difficult enough, but at least human cultures shared a few universal precepts.

Marriage and children, for instance. There had never been a human society that did not have some form of marriage, or one that has failed to cherish their children. Though generations of sailors had routinely violated the principle, most people knew enough to stay away from women in a strange land until they had at least an inkling of the local sexual taboos.

Lisa doubted that they would have any trouble among the Orpheans on that last point. The bullet-headed, octopus necks (as one of the anthropologists had dubbed them) were about as far from the human standard of beauty as it was possible to get. She suspected the opposite was also true.

What concerned her was the possibility that an unintentional slight or insult might create an inter-species incident. Among an unknown race of aliens, that was almost inevitable. For example, what was the local attitude toward bodily functions such as defecation? An alien visiting Earth might find it odd that public toilet facilities were segregated by sex while the ones in private homes were not. Likewise, the human custom of wearing clothes in climates where they were as much hindrance as help would be confusing to an alien who lacked a nudity taboo.

The Orpheans undoubtedly had similar idiosyncrasies in their social arrangements. It had been the job of the Anthropology Working Committee to see what they could learn from the intercepted broadcasts.

They had done their best, but too often, the alien actions had seemed pointless.

Except for their physical peculiarities, the Orpheans were not that different from humans. They had holovision -- that is, communications broadcasts intended for entertainment purposes -- or so the majority of scientists thought. They also seemed to have a large number of “talking heads” programs, possibly even “argument shows,” in which several Orpheans appeared on screen, chattering at one another in their native tongue, and waving their tentacles. The whole scene reminded Lisa of a forest of seaweed waving in agitated surf.

From the behavior they displayed in their holo programs, most anthropologists thought the Orpheans individualistic. The consensus was that they appeared more self-centered than humans did, although Lisa found that difficult to imagine. Most agreed that they were argumentative and would have no aversion to cheating strangers if given the chance.

Lisa was carrying the record tile containing the scientists’ multi-thousand-word tome in her kit bag. The report had only been finished half an hour before she was to depart. She had thought that she would be the only passenger, and was thus surprised when she found Mikhail Vasloff waiting at the airlock for her.

His kit bag was with him and he had the air of someone about to embark on an adventure.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Vasloff?”

“I am going along. It took some convincing, but Captain Landon gave his permission an hour ago. I am to go up with you.”

“I would have thought you would stay here at Hideout,” Lisa replied cautiously, suddenly aware that she might have blundered into sensitive territory.

“Why would you think that?”

“You haven’t exactly been this expedition’s biggest booster, now have you?”

Instead of growing angry, the Russian put his head back and laughed. When he stopped, he said, “I have never heard a statement made more diplomatically, Miss Arden. Perhaps I should recruit you for my little cabal of fanatics.”

“I’ve never called them ‘fanatics,’ Mr. Vasloff.”

“You are about the only one in the Stellar Survey who has not. But then, you aren’t really Stellar Survey, are you?”

“No, sir. I was recruited specifically for this job.”

“Then, you can probably understand my position better than anyone. I am going along to make sure that the more … shall we say, enthusiastic? ... that the more enthusiastic members of our party don’t take leave of their senses.”

“How so?”

“By revealing the location of Earth to these aliens, of course.”

“No one would do that.”

“Not intentionally. Still, we cannot know precisely what information we are divulging just by revealing the fact of our existence. Surely any reasonably knowledgeable Orphean biologist will be able to divine what sort of star we evolved under.”

Lisa nodded. The human body was a veritable signpost to the fact that Sol was a G2 yellow-white star. It telegraphed that fact merely from the wavelength of light at which human eyes focus most sharply. There was no telling what other secrets their bodies might reveal to an alien who knew what to look -- or sniff

-- for. The human body odor must reveal facts about the chemical composition of their home world.

How that would also give the aliens clues to the
location
of Earth, Lisa could not imagine. The problem was that an alien might prove to have a better imagination.

“So how do we know what we are revealing to them?”

Vasloff shrugged. “We don’t. Alien capabilities are, by definition … alien. That is why I am coming along. I will be more on guard than the rest of you. I will see to it that no unnecessary chances are taken.”

“In that respect, we all want the same thing, Mr. Vasloff.”

“Of course. We all want the same things; we just go about it differently. I have no desire to offend, Miss Arden, but perhaps I can explain my point better with an example.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you like Sar-Say?”

The question took a moment to consider. In fact, she did like Sar-Say. He had ceased being a research subject more than a year earlier. He was a quick study and had empathy for human ways of looking at things. Besides, he could be very funny when he put his mind to it. She remembered how devastated she had been during that day and night she had watched over him in the infirmary. It had seemed as though she was losing a child.

“Yes, I suppose I do.”

“Then you would be more likely to believe something he tells you than not?”

Lisa thought about her answer for a moment and then said, “We’ve never caught him in a lie, but that doesn’t mean he tells us the truth, I suppose.”

“Isn’t that what this entire expedition is about? Determining whether Sar-Say has been telling us the truth?”

“We would be fools to take his word for something as big and bad as he says the Sovereignty is.”

“But if he were going to lie about it, wouldn’t he put a happier face on it?”

“That seems logical.”

“Yes, it does. To a human. However, is it logical to a Taff? That is why I am coming along. Like the rest of you, I plan to learn all I can about the Orpheans and the Broa, but I will learn through the eyes of a skeptic, not an advocate.”

“Well, Mr. Vasloff, whatever your motives, it is good to have you along.”

At that moment, a speaker mounted on the rock wall announced that the orbital shuttle to the
Ruptured
Whale
was ready for boarding. They gathered up their meager belongings, and Vasloff ushered her through the portal leading to the docking tube.

A few minutes later, they were spaceborne.

The yellow star in the viewscreen might have been a twin of Sol were it not for the great cloud of gas and dust that lay beyond. The Sky Flower Nebula was not the same universe-spanning wall as in the Hideout System, but it was still the most prominent feature in the sky. In one respect, the Broan conquest of humanity had already begun. Already, bits of trade talk were infiltrating the crew’s daily conversation. It seemed fitting to call the nebula by its Broan name while here in Broan Space.

Dan Landon sat at his station and considered what lay ahead as he sipped tea from a microgravity bulb.

The Crab/Sky Flower Nebula was the unofficial boundary between human space and Broan, at least until they knew better how far the Sovereignty extended along the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.

Nor was the name they called the supernova remnant the only evidence that they were in Broan space.

Around Landon, the bridge crew was checking and rechecking their instruments, all of which had been converted to the dot-dash script of the overlords. A great deal of the symbology used on the screens had been changed as well. Nor were the screens the only things tagged with Broan script. On the long trip out from Earth, virtually all interior markings had been changed over until there were no Latin letters or Arabic numerals visible anywhere a casual observer might spot them. Even the ship’s name had been changed, although she was still officially
The Ruptured Whale
to her crew. Her camouflage name was
Wanderer
, or the Broan trade-talk equivalent. While in orbit about Brinks, a work party had carefully stenciled the name on the hull in patterns of meter-high dots and swirls. They had done everything they could to make the
Whale
appear a trading vessel from a distant region of the Sovereignty.

The crew’s looks had changed as well. During the outbound voyage, every crewmember had gone into a shower cubicle, to emerge with skin the color of a ripe orange. A few minutes under a hood had finished the job by dying their hair electric blue. The transformation had triggered numerous jokes, many off-color; and cohabiting couples reported taking a great deal of time to check the completeness of their partners’ skin dye. The masquerade was not supposed to make humans look like any particular race of the Sovereignty. Rather, it was to make identification difficult should the Broa later become suspicious and request data on the ship full of strangers that had briefly visited the Orpheus System.

Dan Landon wondered if the subterfuge was worth the trouble. After all, though a large change in human eyes, he doubted aliens would notice anything as trivial as the color of their skin.

It had been a month since the
Whale
and her consorts,
Magellan
and
Columbus,
had dropped sublight deep within Orpheus’s Oort cloud. Because Orpheus III was currently on the far side of the star from the nebula, they had circled around and approached the system from directly opposite the Galactic Center.

Thus, they had the star between themselves and the nebula. Having safely reached the outskirts of the system, the two accompanying starships resumed their long-range eavesdropping while the
Ruptured
Whale
started its long fall into the inner system.

The orbit they adopted would make them appear a comet, although one moving substantially above local escape velocity. If spotted, they hoped the local astronomers would take them for a rare bit of debris from out of interstellar space. In any event, imitating an intrasystem comet was out of the question since such an orbit would take years before it delivered them to the stargate. As it was, it had taken three weeks for them to dive into the heart of the Orpheus System using a hyperbolic approach orbit. In another few hours, they would begin decelerating to intrasystem velocity such that when they reached the vicinity of the stargate, they could pretend to be a newly arrived trading vessel.

#

“Report!”

“Stargate is 200,000 kilometers ahead, Captain. We are closing at 60 kps. Deceleration is holding steady at 2.5 gravities and will continue for two more minutes. Closest point of approach to the stargate is in two hours.”

“Very well. Keep me posted.”

Dan Landon’s words were labored by the heavy weight dragging him down. All over the ship, bodies made soft by months in microgravity lay in acceleration couches while their owners labored to breathe and counted the seconds until the sandbags would be lifted from their chests.

“I have a contact, Captain!” the sensor operator announced.

“What sort of contact?”

“It looks like a ship headed for the stargate.”

Landon frowned. A ship was the last thing they needed to encounter in the last phase of their approach, when they were most vulnerable to premature discovery. During the long fall from the Oort cloud, they had looked like an extra-system rock. In a few hours, they would be well into their masquerade as a trading vessel from beyond the stargate. Now, however, they were engaged in a very "un-cometary"

maneuver, decelerating at 25 meters per second squared. Any ship that spotted them now would know that they were 1) not a natural phenomenon, and 2) coming in from the outskirts of the star system. If they were spotted before they were ready, they would have to abandon the mission and try again in another star system.