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“All right, all right,” said
Philippe. “I’ll talk to her.”

“Thanks so much, guy,” said Patch,
standing up with a relieved smile on his face. “Just, you know, get her
yelling. As long as she’s yelling, you’re OK.”

Patch walked out. Philippe gave him
a moment to get clear of the upcoming conflagration and went out to find
Shanti. She wasn’t in her office, but he found her in the mess hall. He asked
her if they could speak. They silently went back to where both their office
doors were. Philippe followed her into her office, thinking that he might as
well let this happen on her turf. She sat behind her desk, and he sat in the
chair in front of it.

“Patch spoke to me, and he told me
that you were very upset by the way I ordered you around the other day,”
Philippe began. “I didn’t realize that what I said was considered offensive by
people in the SF, so I wanted to apologize for any offense I might have caused
you by pulling rank. I realize your job is important, and I value the work you
do, and I am sorry that I made you feel like I did not value you.”

“Right, right, right. You’re
apologizing,” Shanti said, her voice bitter. “Well, I guess that makes everything
fine and dandy, then! Because
you
certainly would never be
insincere
.
You
would never apologize just to hide your agenda. Not
you.
”

Philippe was flabbergasted. “What
agenda? Wanting to talk to the aliens isn’t my
agenda,
it’s my
job.
”

“Oh, and that’s what this is about,
right?” The volume of her voice was rising. “That’s why you chewed Ofay and
Sucre out, right on the spot!”

“We were in the common area!”

“The moment you got back then,
right? You chewed them right out and told them in no uncertain terms that that
was the
wrong
way to handle that situation, and then you told them what
the
right
way to handle that situation would be, right? Because that’s
what you would have done if you had wanted
to fix what was wrong
.”
Shanti punctuated her words by slamming her palm repeatedly into the desktop.
“You would have done that if you wanted them to
do better the next time
.
But that’s not what you want.”

“It’s not?”

“No, it’s not, you motherfucker,
and you know it.” She had stopped pounding the desk in favor of pointing a
finger at Philippe. “You don’t want there to
be
a next time—not with
these soldiers.
You don’t want us here.
You didn’t want us here to begin
with—you think I wouldn’t find out about your memos?—and you’re not willing to
get the fuck over it and work with us. You want to be able to say to Beijing, I
couldn’t use these damned Sister Fuckers. They are so awful—so
fucking awful
—that
I would rather
go without protection
than have them around. That’s what
you want. And now you’re smiling in our faces about it because you’re a fucking
weasel.”

“A weasel?”

“A weasel! A rat! A liar!” She was
certainly yelling now. “Oh, please, oh,
please,
like I haven’t heard you
talking to these aliens. ‘Oh, we people of Earth, we never ever are mean and cruel
to animals. Extinction? What’s that? No we love them and pet them.’ You
manipulate
people. You
lie
to them. You do it
for a living!
”

Philippe sprang out of his chair.
He was shaking with anger.

“You
kill
people for a
living,” he hissed. “How
dare
you judge what I do!”

There is no coming back from
this,
he thought.
There is no way.

But he had to try.

“Listen,” he said, his eyes still
covered, “we’re more alike than you might realize. I mean, I doubt very much
that you enjoy killing people, right? But sometimes, it has to happen. You
don’t like it, but you have to do it. You have to protect the good people from
the bad people, and sometimes the bad people can’t be stopped any other way.”

He dropped his hands and opened his
eyes. He still couldn’t look at her, so he kept his gaze down.

“It’s the same with what I do.
Yeah, sometimes I’m not terribly honest. I don’t want other species to know
about the dodo, because then they’re going to wonder what we’re going to do to
them. The truth does not always serve, because the truth—the unvarnished
truth—is that all too often people aren’t really trustworthy and don’t have
good histories and sometimes only one side is going to win, and if I can gloss
over those truths and manipulate people so that they don’t really care about
them, then that’s what I do. Because that’s better than having people fight and
fight and fight. I do what I have to do so that you won’t have to do what you
don’t like to do.

“I don’t
like
to do it. I
don’t do it if I don’t have to. And I’m not trying some bureaucratic jujitsu to
get you and your people off this assignment. There have been problems, but this
is a very new situation for everyone, and I know that. And I think in general
you guys have done well—I mean, Baby has done really well. And I want to do
really well, too, and I honestly believe that having a four-person armed guard
around me all the time makes it so I can’t do really well. But I understand
that I was too dismissive about your concerns before, and I realize that they
are valid concerns, so I’m willing to talk this out with you.”

“What’s your report going to say?”
Shanti asked.

Philippe looked up, looking her in
the face. This was an opportunity, however small. An opportunity for
negotiation.

“I don’t even have to put this in,”
he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Or I can say, ‘In a meeting with the MC, we
decided that since the security threat to me did not appear to be severe, we
would scale back my protection—’”

“We would make your protection less
conspicuous,” Shanti interjected. “‘Scale back’ sounds bad.”

“We would make my protection less
conspicuous,” Philippe continued with a nod. “Instead of four guards around me
at all times, we decided on one guard—”

“One guard by your side, and two
trailing. That’s what we had yesterday.”

Philippe stared at her for a
moment, and then laughed. “And
I’m
the sneaky one! Look, they’re not all
like Baby—you know that pretty much anyone else will come across like a
bodyguard. How about just the two trailing?”

Shanti looked like she was about to
object, then relented. “They can trail close, right? You’re not going to try to
ditch them?”

“Absolutely. I will fully
cooperate. And when I go into alien living quarters, I’ll always take one with
me.”

Shanti thought on that for a
minute. “If you’ve visited them before with no incident, in that case? I think
it’s OK to take just one. But if you haven’t visited before? I think you should
take both.”

“Oh, thank God,” she said. “I
thought you were really a two-faced rat! All of a sudden you were like, ‘Do
this’ and ‘I don’t want to discuss that.’ You sounded like the old man.”

“The old man?”

“Yeah,
my
old man. And trust
me, when you sound like someone who wants to take over the world with a grand
total of 52 people, you’ve got problems.”

“Great. Just don’t—” Philippe
stopped himself and winced at his own stupidity. They had just patched things
up and now. . . .

“Don’t put poison in your
nightcap?” she asked, sounding slightly amused. “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t poison
you. You should know that I didn’t poison
him
. I was against it.”

“Oh?” said Philippe, not sure how
to respond.

“I wanted to shoot him in the
head,” she continued, pointing her finger to the back of her head and cocking
her thumb as a visual aid. “Quick and certain. But I got outvoted.”

Philippe looked at her. Shanti did
not seem the least bit upset or embarrassed or ashamed.
She’s been dealing
with this all her life,
he realized.
Everyone knows what they did.

“Well,” he said, “I’d like to put
in my vote now
against
your shooting me in the head.”

She laughed again. It was good to
see. “OK. We’ll stick to the yelling.”

They shook hands again, and
Philippe walked out the door, feeling like a tight band across his shoulders
had suddenly been cut free.

Chapter
9

When Philippe walked out into the hallway, he saw George’s
stocky form in the doorway of his office. The doctor turned around, spotted
Philippe, and grabbed his arm.

“Come with me,” he said, his voice
alive with excitement.

He steered Philippe down to the
infirmary. The isolation suite was glassed-in, and in it, on a table, lay the
Hosts’ bag and seven small identical items. They were gnarled and pale
blue—like bits of blue driftwood.

“I think I know what they are,”
said George. “Actually, I checked with Max, so I
know
I know what they
are. But I figured it out first.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense,” said
Philippe.

George launched into a long
explanation, most of which Philippe couldn’t follow. He got eventually got
George to perform his own translation, and the gist of it was that these were
the translation devices used by the Hosts. What really excited George was that
their workings indicated certain things about the aliens’ physiognomy that he
found extremely interesting and that Philippe found completely
incomprehensible.

Philippe kept trying to reflect
George’s excitement, since the doctor had obviously worked quite hard and had
very likely made some major scientific discoveries. But apparently his acting
skills were not up to the job, because the doctor suddenly brought himself up
short. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” said Philippe. “It’s
not like I don’t value science, but I was never very good at it, and I’m just
completely lost here.”

“You look kind of distracted, too,”
said George.

“Oh, I just patched things up with
Shanti,” said Philippe.

“That can be stressful,” the doctor
replied with a smile. Philippe laughed, but George put a hand on his shoulder
and gave him a more somber look. “Seriously, it can be—living in close quarters
like we do, conflicts are bound to happen. If you need some help with stress
management, that’s a big part of what I do as MO.”

Philippe was puzzled. “I thought
your specialty was emergency medicine.”

“Sure, that’s my formal training,”
said George. “But really—when you’re in the Special Forces, you’re dealing with
a healthy, young population outfitted with the best armor and weaponry on the
planet. So the actual emergencies are few and far between. Even in combat
situations I usually spend more time patching up the other side.

“The issues our soldiers face tend
to be more psychological—the emotional impact of combat, coping with these
types of open-ended small-group missions where you’re stuck with the same
people day after day, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, OK,” said Philippe.

“So I can help with a lot of
things: visualization, meditation, breathing exercises. Plus,” he said with a
sly smile, “I’m told I give an excellent massage.”

He did not hear from the Hosts over the next couple of days,
so Philippe spent his time roaming the common area, two soldiers always within
sight. He talked to a number of aliens, including the two Cyclopes he had met
before.

Since Ptuk-Ptik had mentioned that
Cyclopes names were translatable, Philippe asked those two their names, which
were Endless Courage and Brave Loyalty. They were slightly different in color
and build, so it was possible for Philippe to tell them apart—once he knew who
he was talking to. The problem was that the Cyclopes in general looked very
similar to Philippe, and he wasn’t at all sure he would be able to identify
either Endless Courage or Brave Loyalty if he came across one of them alone or
with some other Cyclopes. Indeed, when Philippe ran into Endless Courage and
Brave Loyalty for the third time since his arrival on the station, he had no
idea who they were. Fortunately, they mentioned their earlier talk before
Philippe made a potentially offensive gaffe.