Strider's Galaxy (18 page)

Strauss-Giolitto tuned in briefly to the conversation the other two were having. It was very difficult to concentrate. The decontamination process had exhausted and demoralized her and the day was hot and bright—and without her hardware there was nothing she could do to reduce the effects of the hotness and brightness. What she really wanted to do was find somewhere she could curl up and sleep for a few hours. When she awoke, maybe the remembered humiliation of being scoured by the decontamination bots would be easier to bear. About the only thing keeping her awake was the discomfort of sitting on a stool this low.

"I would like to speak directly with the Image you have with you," Polyaggle was saying. Strauss-Giolitto drowsily thought the Spindrifter still looked thoroughly alluring, even with her wings folded away. There was grace in Polyaggle's every movement.

"Certainly," said Pinocchio courteously. "His name is Ten Per Cent Extra Free, and I am sure that he would take pleasure in communicating with you."

"In private," said the Spindrifter. Strauss-Giolitto wondered what that strangely constructed mouth would look like when Polyaggle smiled—assuming the Spindrifters smiled with their mouths, of course.

Pinocchio nodded. "Are you willing for this?" he asked out aloud, clearly addressing the Image.

YES.

The silence stretched out for several minutes. Something like an insect hummed close to them and inquisitively circled Strauss-Giolitto a couple of times. Horrified, she recoiled from it. It might have a sting that could kill her in seconds. Pinocchio waved it away with a nonchalant hand.

Although the people aboard the
Santa Maria
generally spoke aloud, or at least subvocalized, when communicating with the Images, it was clear that Polyaggle felt no such need, although she had closed her eyes as if to assist concentration.
I wish I could just close my eyes right now,
thought Strauss-Giolitto wearily. Her heart was still beating quickly after her encounter with the little flying thing.
But I'd better not risk it. Falling asleep at someone's party is reckoned rude enough back on Mars—unless you're stoned senseless, of course—but here it might carry the death penalty.

After an appreciable fraction of forever Polyaggle opened her eyes again.

"I have interrogated your Image friend at length," she said, "and he agrees that everything you have told me is substantively true, although on occasion limited by your own ignorance of the true situation in The Wondervale." Yes, Spindrifters did smile with their mouths. Perhaps this was one of the few traits that convergent evolution directed itself towards when producing human-like creatures. "The Images may mislead on occasion, but they never lie. I speak for all in the Affiliated Villages when I say that we will offer you such help as we can without jeopardizing our neutrality."

"That is very kind," said Pinocchio.

"Further than that we will not go."

"That is understood."

Polyaggle smiled again. The effect was disconcerting.

"Our species was among the most rapidly evolving and thus one of the most ancient in The Wondervale, and we were perhaps the first to explore this galaxy—and even Heaven's Ancestor." She gave what Ten Per Cent Extra Free interpreted as a sigh. "That was over a billion years ago." The Image had clearly worked out the Spindrifters' time units at last. "Four or five million years ago, we saw the nature of the new technological civilizations that were arising in The Wondervale, and we decided to abandon space and retreat to our mother world. Other species who were our friends chose to do the same: many of the neutral planets throughout The Wondervale today are the homes of ancient species who made the same decision that we did."

The Spindrifter raised her own, much smaller beaker of water towards her mouth. A tube-like tongue dipped briefly into the liquid.

"I'm explaining all this for a reason," Polyaggle resumed, turning her gaze towards Strauss-Giolitto, as if sensing that the woman's concentration had been drifting again. "We do not wage war—we never have. We have some defenses which we, well, stole from younger species; the task of our military is to maintain these. But our few primitive weapons would be useless should the Autarch or some lesser tyrant decide to occupy this world or destroy it. There are fewer than ten million of us left alive: we have no desire to increase our population, as yet, but we believe that the remnant of our once prolific species is very precious. Hence, please understand, our insistence on retaining not just our absolute neutrality but also the outward appearance of it."

Once more that disturbing smile. "We want Spindrift to remain a backwater, useless, boring little world. Several hundred years ago the Autarchy built the Gate to the Sky here, intent on colonizing this world. We persuaded the tyranny to depart again by ensuring that there was nothing here to be exploited—we don't even make good slaves: we're too frail to be of any use. Occasionally, still, an Autarchy ship will call by and look us over and decide we have nothing to offer that wouldn't be more easily found elsewhere.

"It is necessary for the survival of the last of our species that this situation be preserved."

"But not for ever," said Strauss-Giolitto, suddenly cottoning on. One of the subjects she taught was history. "You said you didn't want to increase your population
as yet
. You're just biding your time, aren't you?"
Everything goes in cycles. What is omnipotent today will be dust tomorrow. It may take half the lifetime of the Universe, but the day will come.

"Yes."

The Spindrifters and the other ancient species will do their best to survive until all the warriors have destroyed themselves, and then they will reclaim their galaxy. No wonder they regard the scraps of their people as so precious.

"We understand your view," said Pinocchio, splaying his hands on the table in front of him and looking earnestly at the backs of his fingers. "Of course you're right. You're the seeds of the civilization that'll grow up once the Autarchy and all its successors have gone. But . . . humanity is a
young
species, not an old one, and—"

"Our way is not your way," said Polyaggle.

"That is what I was trying to say."

"No, you were trying to say that your way is not our way. There's a difference."

Pinocchio looked baffled. Despite the sophistication of his software, on occasion he could be defeated by the minor nuances of language.

"Let's be away from here," said Polyaggle abruptly. "I want to take you to our military." She stood and gave a weird trill that Ten Per Cent Extra Free didn't even try to interpret. "There is much that they could learn from you humans, and there are perhaps one or two things they might be able to tell you in return. I have just summoned a slidecraft, and it will be here very shortly. You"—she turned again towards Strauss-Giolitto—"will be able to sleep during the trip."

Strauss-Giolitto yawned. Sleep was becoming a matter of urgency.

#

"
Lost
them?" bellowed Nalla. "How in the name of the Autarchy can you have
lost
them?"

Even from a safe several hundred parsecs away, Kaantalech flinched at the sight of the Autarch's holographic wrath. When speaking with Nalla, it amused her to keep the image down as small as was consistent with being able to see what was going on. But, even when he was less than a meter tall, the Autarch's rage was spectacular.

She thought it might be a good move to put on a further show of cowering: the Autarch liked his lieutenants to be visibly terrified of him.

"They've just . . .
disappeared
," she said limply.

"By the blessed eyes of my father . . .!" the Autarch began, then obviously remembered what had been done to those eyes during a particularly messy succession. He started again. "By the might of my reign and the love of my people, they can't just have
disappeared
! What has happened is that you've let them go! You're either a traitor or an incompetent or both! Execute yourself at once!"

"I think that would be counterproductive, Stars' Elect," said Kaantalech. She knew that he liked the honorific. Since they were of different species, it was difficult for her to manipulate his moods as she did those of her own kind, but over the decades she had become more adept at it than most. "Whoever took over this region of The Wondervale would undoubtedly be less effective than myself at wooing the alliance of these Humans. I have studied the tapes of Maglittel's efforts extensively. Would any of your other lieutenants have labored so industriously?"

She could almost hear the Autarch thinking. It was painful for her to watch. She gave all her loyalty, life and soul, to her ultimate ruler . . . but one day, with luck, he would turn his back.

"I grant you a stay of execution," he said at last, "but it is only a stay. You must find these Humans and coax them into our service within one hundred Qitanefermeartha days or your life will be forfeit. And the lives of all your kindred."

Kaantalech wasn't particularly worried about the last part of the threat, but the first part did concern her. Summary executions were the Autarch's style. The bald stating of a time period within which a certain task must be accomplished, upon pain of death, was less usual. In the event that the Autarch remembered having issued the threat—or remembered to have a courtier record it for him—any resulting execution was inevitably protracted and brutal.

"I shall use my best endeavors," she said, giving a show of dignity. "But I must start right away."

"You may go," said the Autarch.

She flicked the holo off. Under her fur she was perspiring far more than she would have liked. The populace of some planet, somewhere, was going to have to pay for this.

#

By the time Strauss-Giolitto awoke, the slidecraft was well out over the deserted expanses of the northern polar icecap. She was surprised in a way that, despite her weariness, she'd been able to sleep. The Spindrifters, presumably because if anything went wrong with their craft they could always fly away, didn't go in for the kind of precautions humans did. The top of the slidecraft, as with the cabble back at the spaceport, was open; not too much effort had been put into providing the vessel with stabilization, so that it rocked from side to side and, even more alarmingly, from front to back; the ledge around its rim was no more than half a meter high.

Strauss-Giolitto, who had slept in a tangle on the vessel's floor, pulled herself to her knees with a groan, and peered over the ledge. They were at least several hundred meters above the ice. She decided not to have a second peer.

Rubbing the sleep from her eyes—it seemed so odd to be rubbing her left eye, where the secondary retinal screen had been mounted—she looked back towards the center of the craft. Polyaggle had, like herself, fallen asleep on the floor after programming the navigational unit with their destination. This had seemed an alarmingly simple business: Strauss-Giolitto was accustomed to the controls of even something as lowly as a Martian cabble having countless flashing lights and a bewildering graphic display of information which was beyond the power of most people to understand but was nevertheless reassuring by its very presence. The Spindrifter standard seemed to be about half a dozen buttons and a couple of switches. She assumed that the onboard computers must be infinitely more sophisticated than anything humanity had yet produced.

She hoped so.

The slidecraft was like a flying raft. There was the low ledge around its perimeter and, in place of a mast, the T-shaped pole to which you clung if you wanted to stand upright. Strauss-Giolitto, before sleep had ensnared her, had seen Polyaggle doing this; every now and then the wind of their progress had pulled the delicate Spindrifter right off her feet, so that she had been blown horizontal. The more general method of staying aboard a slidecraft was, Strauss-Giolitto gathered, to squat. She felt idiotic doing it herself; Polyaggle, needless to say, managed the posture with grace and elegance. Pinocchio had just crouched glumly at the front of the craft, beside the simple control panel, and watched the landscape flow by beneath them.

He was still there now.

"Pinocchio," she said.

He turned. "I heard you wake, but I didn't want to look round in case . . . in case I embarrassed you."

She remembered puking so explosively in the shuttle. "That's all right," she said. "If you'd been anoth—" She cut the sentence short.

It was bloody cold up here. Obviously Polyaggle didn't feel it because she was still naked; Strauss-Giolitto should have begged for some extra clothing—would certainly have, had she known where they were going. As it was, the thin white robe offered her body very little protection from the freezing air.

"Do you want to come up beside me?" said the bot. "The view is quite exciting. I never realized there could be wastes like this."

She crawled across to him. The slidecraft chose this moment to hit a pocket of turbulence. She felt the acidity of nausea at the back of her mouth, but swallowed it down. This was nothing like as bad as things had been when the shuttle hit Spindrift's atmosphere. Besides, all she had had in the past few hours was a little water.
You can cope,
she told herself.

She was less confident by the time she reached Pinocchio's side. She crouched beside him, fighting with her stomach. "I think I'm going to die of cold," she said to him.

"Sit up and look at the scenery."

"That's going to make it even worse."

"No, it's not. I have internal power sources. If you sit close to me I can put my arm about you and give you some of my warmth." He smiled down at her upturned face.

Her eyes narrowed. Various of the male personnel on the
Santa Maria
had made her similar offers over the years.

"Don't be silly," said Pinocchio, evidently reading her thoughts. "I'm just a bot, remember."

Nervously, she pulled herself up against him, putting an arm around his shoulders. He put one of his arms around her waist. After a few moments, she began to relax. His body was warm: she felt as if she were leaning against a radiator.