The Companions (22 page)

“I'd love to put the device in IGI headquarters.” Gainor sighed. “I suppose the collateral damage rules that out.”

The assistant considered the matter. “Moore's office is swept three times a day. It's buttoned up like a level patroller's overcoat on a windy night. However, it's on the top floor of one of those multiuse buildings down by the freight transit center. There's a dead records storage place directly below it, and we could encase the device to make the explosion directional.” He smiled. “It could blow ‘up,' literally.”

“Whose records?”

“Bureau of Order.”

“What a nice idea,” said Gainor Brandt.

Garr'ugh Center was a planetary system set aside by the Garr lineage of the Derac for use both as breeding grounds for the young and retirement centers for the aged, retired members of the Garr shipclans, those who had reached the life change and were thus capable of spending time in thought. Though youngsters considered the elders to be mere shells, no longer fit for anything useful, the changed ones thought of themselves as savants and sages, the brains behind exploration and conquest, even more valuable to their race as thinkers than they had ever been as fighters.

Though the elders spent much time in thought and converse, the habits of earlier years were not entirely eradicated. The traditional midmorning warm-sprawl still took place, though the retired ones relaxed upon the Sprawling Ground central to the “Retired Ships,” as they were derisively called by the younger Derac, not entirely without reason. They were, in fact, ships that had been retired when their crews retired. Each retained its original heated sandboxes for sleeping, its convenient fire pits for burning the fur or feathers off edibles before consuming them, and its bridge deck, where the immemorial shipclan rituals were conducted at intervals. The engines still provided warmth, and only the cargo holds were empty, for the ships had been connected to central supply.

On the second and largest planet was the home of G'tach Garr, which had provisioned the exploration that had acci
dentally happened upon Garr'ugh 290. Though the amount advanced to the shipclan had been returned to the G'tach with interest—a satisfaction that was not invariably achieved—the G'tach continued to follow the fortunes of system 290 with great interest, for systems near wormholes, even erratic ones that only opened up every now and then, were useful during war, an occupation usually being engaged in by at least one or two of the seventeen tribes of Derac.

One of the members of G'tach Garr was Gahcha, who held this office by reason of his position as life captain of his Regional Retired Fleet, and Life Captain Gahcha was planning the greatest war in Derac history! Gahcha spoke of this future war at council meetings and, which amazed him, he did so eloquently. At his recent life change he had acquired a mental acuity, a revelatory sharpness that was as startling as it was unexpected. Games whose rules he had never understood he now played with both vigor and success! Conversations he might once have found impenetrable he now comprehended. Deracat, the destiny of the race, a subject he had once found dull and obscure, he now gloried in.

Gahcha's clarity of mind and purpose had first been put to use when he had challenged the previous life captain to a test of strength and wits, during which the previous captain had been deposed by losing his captaincy along with his life. Now Life Captain Gahcha led his Regional G'tach, but soon he would head the G'tach Garr. After that, he would ascend to the Admiralty of the G'tach Derac in order to lead all seventeen clans into a Great Scaly Caough of a war!

Regional life captains determined the crews—for so they were still called—of Regional Home Ships, which housed several thousand retirees. Of that number, Gahcha's own particular Home Ship sheltered a carefully chosen few hundred, and of those, an even more carefully chosen few dozen were his daily companions. On a particular morning, Gahcha announced to these cronies that the large Derac con
tingent on Moss, where his son was currently serving a term as observer, was steadfast but uncomfortable.

“So what does your son say?” demanded one of his colleagues, curling his tail politely to give the life captain more room.

“He says the linguist from Earth will soon arrive,” Gahcha replied. “He says living there is extremely unpleasant because moss grows on their skins all the time, and it's impossible to stay dry. He says they don't believe the Mossen are people, they don't believe they wrote any message, they think the Earthers wrote it themselves because they're mossenated in their minds.”

“And what are the implications?” the colleague persevered.

The life captain squirmed farther onto the warm, soft sand to get some heat back into his belly. Something was wrong with the sandbox in his sleeping cell. Instead of being steadily warm and cozy, it had been cold as space all night and he'd had to sleep in a warm suit. He hated sleeping in a warm suit, always had, even when he was spacefaring, because it made him itch. Great God Ghassifec knew what the maintenance slerfs were up to, but it certainly wasn't doing maintenance! He would complain to the Orskimi. They had designed the slerfs, and had guaranteed their performance. They would have to refit them or whatever it was that Orskimi did to their bionic adaptations!

Setting his annoyance aside, he replied ponderously, “The implications of Moss really affecting people's minds could mean we will have trouble selling the planet, if we ever wanted to, which we don't. The implications of the Mossen really having a language would be that IPP wouldn't let us sell the planet, though we would receive the usual bonus for discovering a previously unknown intelligent race. The implications of having moss grow all over us would be that we wouldn't want it for ourselves, not to live on, though we will certainly use it for our purposes before we leave it!”

“By purposes, you mean, to start the Great War,” said the colleague.

“Very soon, yes,” said the life captain. “Before we go on to conquer the galaxy.”

The others on the sprawling place nodded, making a gargling rumble that might be transliterated, inaccurately, as “H'hachap, H'hachap,” which meant something like “Destiny comes.” One Ghetset, the most vociferous colleague, and also the one in whom the life change had made the least improvement in intelligence, demanded, “Why will we start the war on Moss, Life Captain, sir? If we don't want it for ourselves?”

“We will need it as a staging area for our exploration of that sector. We intend to find the wormhole, which will take many, many ships.”

“Then why did we give the Earthers a contract to start with?” demanded Ghetset. “Why didn't we just keep quiet about it.”

“It is better to have Interstellar Confederation see us conforming to regulations than to have it suspecting us of wrongdoing!” snarled Gahcha. “By calling in the Exploration and Survey team, we can seem to be in compliance with IC regulations while our plans go forward. If they found us on a planet that had not been surveyed for compliance, we might have to fight more than just the Earthers. Eventually we will conquer them all, of course, but not just yet.”

Another colleague forestalled further questions from Ghetset by asking, “Oh, great Life Captain, tell us again how H'hachap will come about.”

Gahcha lowered his neck frill and squirmed slightly deeper into the warm alluvium.

“To advance: Our knowledge of H'hachap began long circuits ago on Planet Gehengha. A Derac just coming up on the life change actually listened to the humans talk, a thing we do not usually bother to do. If anyone thinks otherwise, five minutes spent in the exercise convinces him of the wisdom of unhearing. However, in this case our kinsman
learned of this law the humans have about returning.” Forestalling questions, he held up a warning claw. “It means any human anywhere among their planets can go back to the original birth planet of the race if he wants to. This Derac…”

“What was his name?” asked a fellow lounger.

“Who? Oh. He called himself R'ragh.”

“Thing fixer?”

“Ah…new-maker, reformer. He was later called R'ragh the Reformer, but that was after he became a follower of Ghassifec. To advance: R'ragh came to believe that this law was the source of the humans' power, the power we have sometimes envied, sometimes disdained. We have envied their inventiveness, their concentration. We have disdained the brief, very brief youth they have, only a fifth of their lives or less, compared to half or two-thirds of ours. Even while in the juvenile state, some humans think and study all the time, something no young Derac would conceive of doing. Nonetheless, they have inventions on top of inventions…”

Ghetset said, “They figured out the Plavite Compressor that we found on Garr'ugh 193. We found it, but they figured it out. Next thing you know, they were manufacturing the things by the millions on their factory planets, and what did we get out of it?”

“A royalty,” said Gahcha. “Quite a substantial one.” He used a Derac word meaning “enough and some left over.”

“A royalty!” Ghetset flicked his tongue at an imaginary bug, showing what he thought of royalties. “We could have had the whole thing.”

“We could have…
if
we manufactured things.
If
we'd figured it out,” said Gahcha, turning on his side to sun his left legpits. Several slerf efts crawled into the newly exposed area and began searching under the scales for itch-mites. Though no one present had reason to know it, they looked very much like klonzees. “The fact is, of course, that we don't manufacture things, and we didn't figure the thing out, and as a result, we buy our ships from humans or Ocpurats
or Fifflizen. To advance: All of this was noticed by R'ragh the Reformer, who decided the very things we have disdained about the humans are the things that give them their advantage.”

Ghetset raised his head, inflating his throat pouch, his wattles turning red. “He wanted us to build ships? Who's going to stay in one place long enough to build ships? We don't even build towns! The only thing we build are sprawling boxes for the little ones. Even our retirement homes are worn-out ships built by somebody else. We don't know how to build ships. We've always bought them from other people. The Fifflizen first, then the Ocpurats, the Orskimi, now the humans…”

Gahcha bobbed his head repeatedly, meanwhile reviewing mentally just why it was he had selected Ghetset for this group. Ah, yes. To have someone to whom he could tell things he wished other people to learn of, whether information or disinformation. “Exactly. And why? That's the question R'ragh asked. Why? Why don't we start thinking earlier? Eh? Why do we need a youth that goes on so long? Umm?

“To advance: R'ragh sought answers from an Eetchie he had allowed family status…”

“An Eetchie,” cried Ghetset. “We do not grant Eetchies status as family. What kind of Eetchie was it?”

“This Eetchie was of the Orskimi, one who had been most helpful to R'ragh. It is not unknown to grant Eetchies family status, though it is done rarely and only to one who has done a great favor to Deracat.”

Ghetset pursued the matter with a quotation from scripture. “In the beginning was the great swamp of unbeing, and from this swamp, in the time before knowing, the Derac were created by Ghassifec, in the shape of Ghassifec we were made. All others who swim and move and speak are Eetchies, unworthy creatures, not of the lineage of Ghassifec.”

“So you quote accurately!” Gahcha glared at his associate. “But until the day when all Eetchie shall be cast into Ghassifec's fires of forever, they may still be helpful, and
this Orskim was helpful. It was he who helped R'ragh find the truth about our long youthfulness. The Orskim told him the Derac stay young as long as we can because we enjoy breeding! We don't want to stop breeding! In the far past, we bred endlessly, and ogputi of our young were eaten by the Fez and the Grebel and the Zan, giving us even more reason to breed. Then the Fez were gone, killed mostly by the humans, though some by the Quondan and the Tharst. The Grebel and the Zan were no more, many eggs were laid in our nests, our young lived in great numbers, and we didn't have ships enough for all of them to grow up in.

“To advance: This, said the Orskim, is why we began what he called our current lifestyle, which began not at the roots of time with Great Scaly Caough and the Far-seeing Sixteen, but only an ugget generations ago…”

“So recently?” exploded Ghetset.

The life captain glared at him.

“To advance: The Eetchie Orski told R'ragh that our way of life was not ageless tradition, magma jelled into stone, but a recency, a change from an older system, one that could be changed back! If our females were more like human females, said the Orskim, if they had brains and talk and abilities, they could go with us on the ships. When we found new planets, instead of farming out the exploration to Earthers or Ocpurats, we could settle on the planet and do it ourselves. Also, with our females beside us, we could breed whenever we wanted to, and instead of the old ones taking care of the efts, the females could do it.”

“H'hachap, H'hachap.”

Gahcha nodded repeatedly. “The human females are receptive all the time. Even when they're already bred.”

“That's disgusting,” said a colleague from the edge of the group.

Gahcha acknowledged with a head bob. “Some Derac think so, yes. Some others of us understand what R'ragh the Reformer was telling us. He asked us to think about the time of Great Scaly Caough, the time when we had many young,
and the predatory Zan preyed upon our ships, killing many of them…”

“The Zan preyed on everybody,” said a colleague. “Even the humans.”

“True. But R'Ragh asked us to think about the time when all the Zan were killed, down to the last offshoot, when we suddenly had too many young, when they mutinied on ship after ship, and we ended up having to kill off most of them. R'ragh said that's when we moved the breeding function out of ships, onto retirement planets, and that's when we removed the females from the ships.”

“What could we ever have done with females on ships?” asked someone at the edge of the group. “How did we put up with them? They can't even talk.”

“I suppose we kept them in a special hold, or something,” Gahcha replied. “R'ragh said when we moved the females off the ships, instead of breeding all the time we were
thinking
about breeding all the time, and that didn't leave any time for thinking about anything else. Which is why we don't invent things. It is only when we are past breeding that we think about things.”