Ali Bakhtiar glanced toward the clock. A dark, arched eyebrow rose. "Isn't your first class at 0930, Jennifer? You're going to be late."
"I'm almost ready." Jennifer made sure one last time that she had all her notes. She took a couple of deep breaths, as if she were going to start lecturing then and there. "I hope the hall's well miked. My voice just isn't big enough to carry well by itself."
Bakhtiar smiled encouragingly. "You'll do fine." When he looked at the clock again, the smile faded. "But you'd better get moving."
"Here I go." Jennifer ran a hand through her long, blond hair. "Do I look all right?"
"That is a foolish question. You know you look wonderful." He stepped forward to kiss her; his hand slid down her back to cup her left buttock. He pulled her closer. The kiss went on and on.
Finally she twisted away. "You were the one who said I'd be late," she reminded him. She knew her looks drew men to her; she found that a nuisance as often as she enjoyed it. Living with Ali Bakhtiar the past year had at least given her an anchor. Seeing her on his arm kept a fair number of other men—not all, but a fair number—from pestering her. Even so, there were times when she wished she was still trading with aliens, to whom she was as peculiar as they were to her. It made life simpler.
But as she strode out of the apartment she and Bakhtiar shared, that sometimes-wish vanished. This would be her third semester of teaching Middle English science fiction at Saugus Central University. She still had trouble believing that, after close to ten years traveling the wilder reaches of the local arm of the galaxy, she actually had the academic job she'd wanted all along.
Sometimes you'd rather be lucky than good, she thought as she hurried toward and then across the university campus. She'd been about to set out on yet another trading run when word of the opening at Saugus Central came over the data net. The post would have been long filled by the time she got back, which meant she would have left on one more mission still, just to put more credit in her account. By the time the next job opening appeared, she might have been nearing master-trader status. Master trader was all very well—after some years of trading, she knew it was a title that had to be earned—but she much preferred putting assistant professor in front of her name.
Saugus was a good planet for hurrying. The weather here in the foothills was cool and crisp, the gravity was only about .85 standard, and the air held a little more oxygen than human beings had evolved to breathe. The clock in the classroom said 0929 when she stepped through the door. She grinned to herself. Being late on the first day didn't make a prof look good.
She got to the podium just as the clock clicked to 0930. "Good morning. I'm Dr. Logan," she said—she didn't believe in wasting time. "This is Middle English 217: Twentieth-century Science Fiction." Someone got up and left in a hurry. In the wrong room, Jennifer thought. Other students tittered.
"Can you all hear me?" Jennifer asked. Everyone nodded, even the students in the back of the hall. The miking was all right, then. Her voice was so light and breathy that it needed all the help it could get.
"All right. This course is part language, part literature. As you'll have noticed when you were registering, beginning and intermediate Middle English are prerequisites. Don't forget, the documents we'll be reading are a thousand years old. If you think you'll be able to get through them with just your everyday Spanglish, or even with an ordinary translation program, you can think again."
Someone else, a girl this time, walked out the door shaking her head. Jennifer felt the eyes of the rest of the class upon her. Most students muttered their notes into recorders with hush-mikes. A few stroked typers or scribbled on paper in the ancient fashion; in every class, she'd found people who remembered better when they wrote things down.
A couple of male students hadn't started taking notes at all. She could tell what was in their minds as well as if she were telepathic. It annoyed her. No only were they boys by her reckoning, but she'd been places and faced challenges they could hardly imagine. She knew they didn't care what she'd done. To them, she was only an attractively shaped piece of meat. That annoyed her even more.
She sighed to herself and went on, "That's not to say you won't find words—a lot of words—that look familiar. A lot of Spanglish vocabulary can be traced back to roots in Middle English. That's especially true of Middle English science fiction. Many, in fact most, of our modern terms relating to spaceflight come from those first coined by science-fiction writers. Remarkably, most of those coinages were made before the technology for actual spaceflight existed. I want you to think for a moment of the implications of that, and to think about the leap of imagination those writers were taking."
Some of them made the mental effort, she saw. She knew they were doomed to failure. Imagining what humanity had been like before spaceflight was as hard for them as willing oneself into the mind of an ancient Sumerian would have been for an ordinary citizen of the twentieth century.
She held up a sheet of paper. "I want to talk about the books we'll be reading this semester," she said. The back door to the lecture hall opened. She frowned. This was one of the times she wished she had a deep, booming voice. She hated latecomers interrupting her when she'd already started lecturing. She began, "I hope you'll be on time for our next—" but stopped with the complaint only half-spoken. The new students were not human.
The whole room grew quiet when the three of them walked in. They were dark blue and on the shaggy side. The door was more than two meters high, but they had to stoop to get under the lintel. The door was more than a meter wide, but they had to turn sideways to go through it. Their faces had short muzzles and impressive teeth.
"What species are they?" a student in the front row asked the fellow next to her. He shrugged and shook his head. Likely neither of them had ever been off Saugus before, Jennifer thought.
She knew the aliens' race. Of all the places she would never have expected to meet Foitani, though, a Middle English class on a human-settled planet of no particular importance to anyone ten light-years away came close to topping the list. Maybe, she thought, they were looking for the engineering department instead. She called, "How may I help you, Foitani?"
The three big blue creatures cocked their heads to one side, listening to the translators each wore. One of them answered, speaking softly in his own rumbling language. His translator turned the words to Spanglish. "Apologies for tardiness, honored instructor. We concede the fault is ours; we will yield any forfeit your customs require."
"We will," the other two echoed.
"No—forfeits—are necessary," Jennifer said faintly. "May I direct you to the class you are seeking?"
The Foitan who had spoken first bared his teeth—or possibly hers; the differences between Foitani sexes did not show on the outside. Jennifer knew the gesture was the Foitani equivalent of a frown, but it made the alien look as if he intended to take a bite out of someone. She wished for the trader's stunner she seldom wore any more. The Foitan said, "Have we interpreted your symbology inaccurately? This hall is not for the teaching of Middle English two-one-seven?"
"You're enrolled in my class?" Jennifer heard herself squeaking, but couldn't help it. It wouldn't matter anyhow; translators were fine for meaning, but they filtered out tone of voice.
"So we ought to be," the Foitan answered, his own translator sounding grave as usual. "Our funds were accepted, our names inscribed in your computer banks. I am Thegun Thegun Nug; here beside me stand Aissur Aissur Rus and Dargnil Dargnil Lin."
Jennifer shoved notes aside. "Enrollment," she muttered. The list appeared on the screen set into the top of the podium. Sure enough, the three Foitani were on it. Human names came in such bewildering variety that she hadn't especially noticed theirs. "Very well," she said, "sit down—if you have the reading knowledge of Middle English this course requires."
The Foitani sat. They weren't so much bigger than the average human as to make human furniture impossible for them—just enough bigger to be intimidating, Jennifer thought. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "We will meet the language requirements of the course, honored instructor. We are Foitani, after all. We are practiced in dealing with languages far more ancient and different from modern speech than your Middle English."
She knew that was true. "Very well," she said again, and began talking about the books she would be assigning. Never had she had such perfect attention from students on the first day of class. After the ostentatious if somber politeness of the Foitani, it was as if all her human students feared they would be torn limb from limb if they got out of line.
Because she didn't have to pause even once, she got through all the material she'd planned to present in spite of the delay the Foitani had caused. Only after the three big aliens left the hall did the rest of the people there start chattering among themselves. Even then, their voices were low, subdued.
Jennifer went back to her office to see how the campus computers were doing on a couple of her pet research projects. The new printouts had some important data, but didn't interest her as much as they should have: With three Foitani—Foitani!—enrolled in her course, she had trouble getting excited about revised charts of de Camp's use of the colon rather than the comma to introduce quotations, or on a fresh stemma tracing the spread of the word "thutter" from Anderson to writers of the next generation like Stirling and Iverson.
After lunch, she taught one course in modern Spanglish literature and another in composition, neither of which excited her very much but both of which helped pay her half of the rent for the apartment she shared with Ali Bakhtiar. She told herself she would have gone through them without much thought no matter what; with three Foitani in her morning class to think about, she knew she wasn't giving the afternoon sessions her full attention.
When she got back to the apartment, Bakhtiar was already there. His last class—he taught imaging, both tape and film—got out half an hour before hers. All she wanted to do was exclaim about the Foitani. He listened, bemused, for several minutes; she was not usually the sort to gush. At last, he held up a hand. "Wait one second, please. Why are you so excited about having these three aliens in your class?"
"That's what I was telling you," Jennifer said. "They're Foitani."
"So I'd gathered," he answered with a wry quirk of that eyebrow. Sometimes she thought he practiced in a mirror, but she'd never caught him at it. "But who are the Foitani?"
She stared at him. "You really don't know?"
"Why should I?" he asked reasonably. "How many species of aliens do we know? Several hundred without hyperdrive, several dozen with it. That's on top of Allah only knows how many human-settled worlds. So why should I remember anything in particular about this one bunch?"
Jennifer knew he was right—humanity had spread too widely, learned too many things, for any one person to keep track of more than a tiny fraction of all there was to know. But somehow Bakhtiar's complete ignorance of the Foitani badly irked her. She wanted to exclaim over them and have him exclaim right back. How could he do that if he had no idea why she was exclaiming in the first place?
He saw something was wrong; after all, he had lived with her for a year. Spreading his hands to placate her, he said, "Tell me about them, then, if they're that important."
"Well, for one thing, we've only known they aren't extinct for about the past fifty years," Jennifer said. "They used to rule a big empire in toward the galactic center, a good many thousand years ago. Then they started fighting among themselves; I don't think anybody knows why. They kept right on doing it, too, till they'd wrecked just about all the worlds they lived on."
"Wait a minute." A light came on in Bakhtiar's eyes. "Didn't they run a holovid special on that three or four years ago? Secret of the lost race, or something like that? I remember watching it, but I'd forgotten the name of the race."
"I suppose they may have," Jennifer said. Three or four years ago, she'd been dickering with the Atheters over the price of omphoth ivory. "But yes, those were the Foitani. Are the Foitani," she corrected herself.
"Why have they enrolled in your Middle English class? What do they think they're going to get out of it?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," Jennifer said. "Of course, I don't know what about a third of my human students are going to get out of the class either, except for four units of credit."
Several years of trading missions among the stars had let her forget the time-serving students, the ones who took a course because they needed to fill a breadth requirement or because it happened to fit their schedules. The ones she'd remembered were the ones like herself, who enrolled in classes to learn something and worked hard at everything, for pride's sake if for no other reason. Saugus Central University had plenty of those. Unfortunately, it had plenty of the other sort, too, as she'd found to her dismay.
Ali Bakhtiar said, "Well, it's nice you had something out of the ordinary to liven up your day. Let's go have dinner, shall we?"
"Foitani in a Middle English class is more than something out of the ordinary," Jennifer said. But Bakhtiar was already walking into the kitchen and didn't hear her—the apartment wasn't miked. Glaring at his back, Jennifer followed him.
She wanted to talk more about the aliens after dinner, but he turned on a battleball game and was lost to the world for the next couple of hours. Battleball required the biggest, strongest bruisers humanity produced. The Foitani, Jennifer suspected, could have torn most of them in half without working up a sweat—assuming Foitani sweated in the first place.
She didn't care about battleball one way or the other. She sometimes watched because Ali liked it so much; it gave them something to do together out of bed. Tonight she didn't feel like making the effort. She went into the bedroom to work on the computer for a while.
When she found herself yawning, she shut down the machine. She needed a few seconds to return from the distant past's exciting imagined future to her own thoroughly mundane present. Somehow hardly anyone in Middle English science fiction ever got bored or had to go to the bathroom at an inconvenient time or worried about her credit balance.
As she went off to the bathroom, Jennifer reflected that her own credit balance was in pretty good shape. Thanks to the omphoth ivory, she had a good deal more to her name than if she'd landed the first academic job she'd tried for. And she had no business being bored, not with three Foitani to wonder about.
She hoped the Foitani would get around to explaining just what they were doing in a Middle English course. She didn't know enough about their customs to risk asking straight out, but she'd die of curiosity if they kept quiet all semester.
She spat toothpaste foam into the sink. In the front room, Ali Bakhtiar yelled, "Reload and spin, fool, before he gets you!" The battleball game was in the last five minutes, then. Jennifer made a sour face. If Ali thought battleball more interesting than the Foitani, that was his problem.
Even when she got into bed, the big blue aliens would not leave her mind. Thegun Thegun Nug, Aissur Aissur Rus, and—what was the third one's name? Dargnil Dargnil Lin, that was it. She wondered if they were males or females. She thought of them as males, but that was only because they were large and had deep voices: anthropocentric thinking, the worst mistake a trader could make.
But she wasn't a trader any more. She was doing what she'd trained to do—what she'd always wanted to do, she told herself firmly.
Ali Bakhtiar came to bed a few minutes later. Her back was to him. She breathed deeply and steadily. He stroked her hair and slid his hand down to the curve of her hip. Most of the time, she enjoyed making love with him. Tonight, though, she was still annoyed at him for not caring more about the Foitani. She kept on pretending to be asleep. If Bakhtiar tightened that hand so she'd have to notice it, he'd get all the fight he wanted and then some.
He didn't. He took it away, muttered something grumpy under his breath that she didn't quite catch—just as well, too, she thought—and rolled onto his stomach. Moments later, he was snoring. As if to punish herself for feigning sleep, Jennifer lay awake for the next hour and a half.
The Foitani pulled their weight in the Middle English class. However they did it, they stayed up with the reading. They were certainly more familiar with human customs than Jennifer was with theirs; they asked good, sensible questions and seldom needed anything explained more than once.
Little by little, they started becoming individuals to Jennifer. Thegun Thegun Nug seemed to be senior to the other two; they deferred to him and let him speak first. Aissur Aissur Rus thought for himself. His interpretations of what he'd read were most apt to be off-base, but also most apt to be interesting and original. Dargnil Dargnil Lin, by contrast, was conservative: steady, sound, not likely to go far from the beaten path but perfectly reliable on it. The studies all three of them turned in were among the better ones she got from the class. No doubt they'd linked their translator programs with the printer, but humans whose first language wasn't Spanglish did that, too.
Jennifer spent the first couple of weeks in the course on stories that dealt with alien contact. Experience had taught her that students enjoyed the theme, enjoyed seeing how wildly wrong most ancient speculation was. That some writers came within shouting distance of what the future really looked like also piqued their interest.
"Remember, science fiction wasn't supposed to be prophesy," she said. "Trying to foretell—to guess—the future is a much older set of thought processes. Science fiction was different. Science fiction was a literature of extrapolation, of taking something—some social trend, some new technology, even some ideology—that existed in the writer's time and pushing it farther and harder than it had yet gone, to see what the world would look like then.
"Of course, a lot of it became trivial even within a few years after it was written. Social trends, especially, changed so fast that they rarely lasted long enough to be carried to the extremes writers imagined. As humans have always been, in the twentieth century they were sometimes radical, sometimes reactionary, sometimes sexually permissive, sometimes repressive. They'd go through two or three of these cycles in a person's lifetime, as we do today.
"Some writers, though, chose harder questions to ask: how humanity would fit into a community of intelligent beings, some quite different from us; how we should treat each other under changed circumstances; what the relationship between government and individual should be. That's why writers like Anderson, Brin, and Heinlein can still make us think today, even though the worlds they imagined didn't come true."
Somebody stuck up a hand. "Why are the videos from that time at an intellectual level so much lower than the books?"
"That's a good question," Jennifer said approvingly. "The answer has to do with the economics of book and video distribution back then. Books made money with much smaller audiences than videos did, so they could target small segments—in the case of science fiction, generally the better-educated section—of the population, and present sophisticated ideas to them. Videos needed mass appeal. They borrowed the exotic settings and adventure of written science fiction, but seldom attempted to deal with serious issues."
"Another question, please, honored professor?"
"Yes, go ahead, Aissur Aissur Rus." Jennifer was always curious to hear what the Foitani would ask. Aissur Aissur Rus had a special knack for coming up with interesting questions.
He did not disappoint her now. "Honored professor, I taste the intellectual quality of the authors you mention, which is indeed praiseworthy. Yet others—Sturgeon, Le Guin—seem to write more pleasingly. Which carries the greater weight?" His bearlike ears twitched. Jennifer thought that meant he was pleased with himself.
"Before I answer, Aissur Aissur Rus, may I ask a question in return?" Jennifer said. He waved a hand back and forth in front of his face. She knew that meant yes. She went on, "How have you learned Middle English well enough to have a feel for its style?" Not many human undergrads, even with computer aids, developed that kind of sensitivity to a language not their own.
Aissur Aissur Rus said, "To prepare us for this class, honored professor, our people used a Middle English/Spanglish program, a Spanglish/Raptic program—Rapti, you should know, is a world that once lay at the edge of Foitani space—and finally one from Raptic into our own tongue. Eventually our machines acquired sufficient vocabulary and context cues to abandon the two intermediate programs; they began to read directly from Middle English into our speech. From that point, it was not hard for us to learn Middle English directly."
"I see," Jennifer said slowly. And indeed she did see how, but not why. What good was ancient science fiction to the Foitani? She almost asked straight out. Before she did, though, she felt she had to deal with Aissur Aissur Rus's question. "In their own time, the writers you named—and some others like them—were often very highly esteemed indeed, exactly because they were such fine stylists. And to say they did not address serious issues is not true, either. But they are less often read now because their concerns are not as relevant to us today as those of other authors. Do you see?"
"Yes, I taste the distinction you are cooking, but I am not sure it is valid," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "Again I ask, which carries the greater weight, abstract artistic excellence or utility?"
"That is a question humans have asked for as long as they have examined their own art," Jennifer said with a smile. "No one has ever come up with a definitive answer."
"Questions have answers," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said reprovingly.
"That may be so, but often only on a case-by-case basis—and with something as subjective as artistic elegance, one man's answer is another man's error," Jennifer said.
"Before the Suicide Wars, the Great Ones would have known." Even through the translator's flat tones, Dargnil Dargnil Lin sounded sure of that.
"If the Great Ones were as great as that, why did they fight the Suicide Wars?" Aissur Aissur Rus asked. Jennifer did not think the remark had been meant for the class to hear, but the translator sent it forth all the same.
Thegun Thegun Nug said, "Enough. We interrupt the discourse of the honored professor." All three Foitani visibly composed themselves to listen. Jennifer found she had no choice but to go on with her lecture. One day, she told herself, I will ask my questions of them. It would not be that day, though.
"It's so frustrating," she said to Ali Bakhtiar when she got home from her last class. "They're good in class. They're very good. But what are they doing there?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," Bakhtiar answered, as he had every time she raised the issue. Now his patience showed signs of wearing thin. "I wouldn't lose sleep over it, either. If they want to spend good money to hear you talk about your musty old books, that's their problem, not yours."
"Musty old books? Problem?" Jennifer didn't know where to start being indignant at all that.
"You look silly standing there with your mouth hanging open," Bakhtiar said.
If she'd had her stunner on her belt, she would have given him a dose big enough to keep him out the rest of the night—and maybe for the week after that. Her mouth was open, she realized. She shut it. She wasn't indignant any more; she was furious. Usually anger made her come to pieces. Now she knew what she had to do. When she spoke again, her voice was even tinier than usual. "I'll start looking for my own apartment."
Ali Bakhtiar stared at her. "Don't do that!" he said in alarm. She watched his face, the way his eyes moved up and down her. The alarm wasn't for her, at least not the part of her that dwelt behind her eyes. It was concern that he wouldn't be able to sleep with her any more. As if to prove it, he reached out to take her in his arms.
She took one step back, then another. He followed. "You leave me be," she said. She hated her voice for quavering. Her eyes filled with angry tears. She hated them even more.
"You're just upset," Bakhtiar said smoothly. "If it'll make you feel better, I'll apologize. Come here, Jennifer; it's all right." He put his hands on her shoulders.
A moment later he reeled away, right hand clutching left wrist. Jennifer hoped she hadn't broken it. She'd never needed unarmed combat on any of the worlds she'd visited, but all traders learned it, to protect themselves from aliens and humans both. Now she was using it for the first time, not a five-minute walk from the peaceful campus where she'd wanted to spend her days in quiet research. She'd already learned life didn't always work out the way one thought it would.
She walked past Ali Bakhtiar to the phone. He flinched back from her as if she'd suddenly sprouted fangs and talons; his eyes said he'd never seen her before. Maybe he hadn't, not really—maybe all he'd paid attention to was the small, shapely body, the blond hair that fell to the small of her back, the blue eyes and clear features. She started getting angry all over again.
She keyed the number of a friend, a colleague in the dead languages department a few years older than she. "Ella? It's Jennifer. Is there any chance I could sleep on your couch for a few days? I've had a fight with my boyfriend and I'll be moving out of here as soon as I can."
"I don't see any reason why not," Ella Metchnikova answered, her almost baritone contralto booming in Jennifer's ear. "Come on over."
"Thank you, Ella dear. I will." Jennifer hung up, threw some books, disks, and papers into an attaché case, then tossed the case, a change of clothes, and her toothbrush into a blue plastic shopping bag. She paused at the door to look back at Ali Bakhtiar. "I'll be out of here just as quick as I can get a place. If you mess with my things, even a little bit, I won't hit you in the wrist next time. I promise you that."
Then she had an afterthought. She went past Bakhtiar again, this time into the bedroom. It spoiled her grand exit, but she did not care for melodrama in her own life anyhow. She found her stunner and dropped it into the bag, too. One more trip by her lover—her former lover, she amended to herself—and she was gone.
Ella Metchnikova lived only a few blocks away. Her apartment building—and her apartment—were nearly clones of the one in which Jennifer had lived; the same construction company must have put up both of them.
Ella was large and blustery. She hugged Jennifer when she came in, kissing her on each cheek. "You have my sympathy, if you want it," she said. "More likely you think you're well rid of him, and if you think that, you're probably right. Let me give you something more practical instead." She took a glass from the refrigerator and handed it to Jennifer.
Jennifer sipped cautiously. Ella had handed her glasses before. Sometimes they were tasty, sometimes anything but—one of Ella's hobbies were reconstructing drinks nobody had drunk for hundreds of years. There were often good reasons why nobody had drunk them for hundreds of years.
This one wasn't bad—smooth, a little sweet, not alcoholic enough to scorch her throat or make her eyes water. As she was supposed to, she asked, "What's it called?"
"A Harvey Wallbanger," Ella said. "Orange juice, ethanol, and a liqueur called Galliano that I just found a bottle of last week. I thought it was long since extinct, but somebody still makes it. Can't imagine why. It's death by itself—think of high-proof sugar syrup with yellow food coloring. But it is good for something, you see."
"Yes, so it is." Jennifer took a larger sip, then another one. Warmth spread from her stomach. "Thanks for taking me in on short notice."
"On no notice, you mean." Ella laughed. A moment later, the laugh got louder. "I didn't know anybody on this planet could blush."
Jennifer's cheeks only grew hotter. "I can't help it if I'm fair."
"I know you can't. I can't help laughing about it, either. Have you had dinner?"
Jennifer let Ella mother her. It took her mind off the sudden crash of her relationship with Bakhtiar and off the hideous nuisance of moving—although her trader training would come in handy there, for she was used to packing quickly and thoroughly. Her trader training kept coming in handy all sorts of ways, something she'd certainly not expected when she signed up as an apprentice. All she'd wanted was something out of the ordinary on her resumé.
After dinner, she accessed the realty data net to see what sort of apartment she could find. The results of the search annoyed her: with the semester well begun, the units nearest the campus were full up. "Nothing closer than three kilometers," she complained.
"Maybe I ought to take that one," Ella said, looking over her shoulder. "You could have this place. I need the exercise more than you do." She sighed. "No, it wouldn't do. Knowing me, I'd take the shuttle in instead of walking. Oh, well."
Still grumbling, Jennifer electronically arranged to move into the nearest apartment she'd found, though she put in a withdrawal option in case something closer to the university opened up before she took possession of the new place. She'd enjoyed walking to work. She could afford the penalty she'd have to pay if she used the option.
"When does it come vacant, three days from now?" Ella asked.
"That's right. I hope I won't be too much a bother till then," Jennifer said. She'd already started thinking about what she could give Ella to repay her kindness.
"Tonight's not a problem, and neither is tomorrow. But the day, or rather the night after that—well, I'd invited Xavier over, and . . . you know what I mean," Ella said.
"Oh, yes," Jennifer said quickly. Ella and Xavier had been lovers for a long time. Jennifer didn't know how long, but it was longer than she'd been on Saugus. "I'll find someplace else to be, even if I have to sleep in the office that one night. It has a couch, of sorts; that wouldn't be too bad, really. And I'll be going into the new place the next day, so I won't cramp you any more after that."
"You're sweet, Jennifer. Sometimes I think you're too sweet for your own good. That's why you surprised me when you said you were breaking up with Ali. What touched that off, if you don't mind my asking?"
Jennifer started to explain about the Foitani. Before she'd gone three sentences, she ran into the same wall of incomprehension with Ella that had driven her out of the arms of Ali Bakhtiar. Even though humans had spread over several thousand light-years, most of them, if they traveled at all, went from one human-settled planet to another and had only sketchy dealings—if any—with the many other species who shared the galaxy with them. Ella knew a lot more about ancient distilling techniques than she did about the Foitani.
When Jennifer was done, her friend shrugged and said, "It doesn't seem like much of a reason to me, but you know best how you feel. And it sounds like something else would have happened if this hadn't."
"I suppose so," Jennifer said. "I guess I knew I was more or less marking time with Ali." She ruefully shook her head. "I hadn't expected to get my nose rubbed in it this way, though."
"You never do," Ella said. "I remember this fellow I was seeing about ten years ago . . ." The tale that followed went on for some time and was more lurid than the fiction Jennifer was used to reading.
When she tried to sleep in Ella's front room, Jennifer tossed and turned. She was still upset. Moreover, the couch was harder and narrower than her big bed. The room wasn't as dark as her bedroom, and the noises of ground traffic outside were louder. Someone in an apartment across the courtyard had a clock that chimed the hours. She listened to it announce midnight, then, a year or so later, one o'clock. Finally she slept.
Ella's alarm screamed like a banshee—worse than an Atheter, Jennifer thought fuzzily as her panic at the hideous noise faded and she realized what it was. Ella was either a serious sleeper or selectively deaf, because the clock squalled on and on until at last she yelled for it to shut up.
Jennifer winced at her red-tracked eyes after she got out of the shower. She felt as if she had a hangover, without even the remembered pleasure of getting drunk the night before. Moving as if underwater, she dressed in her one clean outfit—making a mental note to wash the shirt and skirt she'd worn yesterday—dove into a cup of coffee, gulped down a fruit bar, and headed for the university.
The caffeine and the thought of the material she was going to present made her more lively by the time her Middle English class rolled around. She was beginning a new unit today, which also pleased her; she felt as if she was turning over a whole new leaf in her life. That absurd jingle left her chuckling to herself as she strode into the lecture hall.
The chuckles disappeared before she reached the podium. She fixed the class with as steely a gaze as she could muster—not very steely, she knew down deep, but she did her best. In what she hoped was a stern voice, she demanded, "Who hasn't kept up with the reading for today?"
A few luckless souls, lazy and honest at the same time, raised their hands. "You'll have to do better than that," she told them. "You knew when you enrolled—you certainly knew when you saw the syllabus—your work load would be heavy here. You have to stay with the lectures if you expect to get full benefit from the course."
Thegun Thegun Nug and the other two Foitani had kept their big, thick-fingered hands down. Jennifer was sure it wasn't because they didn't want to admit they'd fallen behind. She almost used them as an example, to say to the rest of the class, See, if they can keep up, you ought to be able to. Only the thought that they might not want to be singled out held her back.
She said, "We're not going to look at imaginary aliens for a while. Instead, we'll consider science fiction's examination of a problem that was pressing for several generations: the risk that mankind would annihilate itself over local disputes on Earth before it acquired the technology to get off the planet."
All three Foitani sat straighter in their slight, too-small chairs. She thought of the history of their race and shivered a little: a species didn't have to be planet-bound to do a pretty fair job of annihilating itself.
"For those of you who did read the lesson," she went on, "we'll discuss A Canticle for Leibowitz first. Ever since it was written, many people have named it the best science fiction novel of all time. The section I want to examine now is the middle one, the one called 'Fiat Lux.'"
"What is the meaning of this heading?" Aissur Aissur Rus asked. "Our translator program broke down on it, making obscure references to ancient wheeled conveyances and soaps. This does not seem appropriate to the content of the book."
"It sure doesn't." Jennifer wondered how any program could come up with anything so farfetched. "Maybe the problem is that the heading isn't in Middle English but rather Latin, a still older human speech. 'Fiat Lux' means 'let there be light.'"
"Ah." That wasn't Aissur Aissur Rus; it was a human student. Several others also made notes. Jennifer silently sighed. Lazy, she thought. They should have had no trouble accessing the meaning of the phrase. Not only was Latin still used liturgically, it was an important ancestral tongue to Spanglish.
"'Fiat Lux' is particularly interesting for its blend of historical analogy and extrapolation," she said. "The role of the church in the piece is based on what the church actually did after the collapse of the Roman civilization earlier in Earth's history; the Romans, by the way, were the people who used Latin.
"But the civilization which Miller envisioned collapsing after nuclear war was his own, which had already become highly dependent on technology. As civilization restored itself, as it began to discover once more how the world worked, it also began to discover that it was in fact rediscovering, was only finding out what its ancestors had already known. Miller effectively paints into his book the intellectual turmoil this realization would create—"
Jennifer stopped there. She hadn't intended to, but one glance at the Foitani would have distracted anybody. They weren't making a racket, they weren't even jumping up and down, but they had come to full alert for the first time in her presence. When a large creature—three large creatures—with spiky ears and good teeth comes to full alert in a human's presence, the human comes alert, too. Three million years of biological programming was screaming Wolves! in her ears.
She needed only a moment to collect herself. Thanks to her time as a trader, she knew how to break free from the prejudice of shape. A small part of her mind noted that she was thanking her time as a trader rather often these days. That annoyed her, all the more so as she'd wished she was on a nice, quiet university campus while it was going on.
She said, "Is there a question?" Her voice was still light, but steady enough.
She'd expected the Foitani to be bursting with questions. They surprised her. They started when she spoke to them, then looked at each other, as if she'd caught them picking their noses—if doing that was bad Foitani manners.
Finally Thegun Thegun Nug said, "No, no questions at this time, honored professor. We were merely interested in the analogies between the world this author draws and the experiences of our own people."
"Very well, I'll go on," Jennifer said. The translator's tone was as bland as ever, but she knew she'd heard a lie just the same—or at least, not all of the truth. Something more than interest in analogies had stirred up the Foitani there. But if they didn't care to talk about it with a human, what could she do?
Distractedly, she got through the rest of the day's presentation. The discussion was less lively than she'd hoped, not least because the Foitani had stopped taking part. They paid close attention to everything she and the humans students said, though: their ears kept twitching. Maybe that was a reaction they couldn't control.
When Jennifer got back to Ella's apartment, she wanted to talk about the aliens' extraordinary reaction to A Canticle for Leibowitz. Ella didn't want to listen. Ella was planning tomorrow's extravaganza with Xavier and wanted to talk about that. Jennifer, who was sick of men in general and Ali Bakhtiar in particular, made a poor audience.
After she and her friend discovered they weren't going to communicate that evening no matter how hard they tried, Jennifer began playing with the computer and de Camp's colons again. She wondered if some of the works where commas appeared instead were the work of overzealous copy editors. Offhand, she couldn't think of a single twentieth-century author who had a good word to say for copy editors.
The next day in class, she talked more about A Canticle for Leibowitz, comparing it to other works that looked at the aftermath of atomic war: Davy, The Postman, Star Man's Son. "This subgenre of science fiction was played out by the end of the twentieth century," she said. "By then it had become plain that such a conflict would not leave the survivors, if there were survivors, in any condition to recover as quickly as earlier writers had imagined."
Again, the Foitani stirred. Again, Jennifer thought they would say what was in their minds. Again, they did not. She almost asked them straight out. Unfortunately, that seemed to lie in the unpleasant middle ground between foolhardy and suicidal. The Foitani had been willing, even eager to talk before. Why not now, with a topic that really hit them where they lived? Jennifer had no answers. Grumbling to herself, she finished her presentation and stalked out of the lecture hall.
She went through her other two classes on automatic pilot. Still on automatic pilot, she started back toward her own apartment. After a couple of hundred meters, she muttered, "Idiot!" under her breath and turned toward Ella's building. After another fifty meters, she said, "Idiot!" again, much louder this time. A student close enough to hear gave her a curious look. Her cheeks flamed. That seemed only to interest the student more—he was a young man. Jennifer spun away and tramped with grimly determined stride back to her office.
It wasn't the ideal place to spend a night. The "couch of sorts" was considerably more disreputable—and shorter—than the one in Ella's apartment. But the rest room was only a couple of doors down the hall. For one night, it would do. Tomorrow, Jennifer thought, I'll be in my own new apartment. That made the idea of one uncomfortable evening—even the thought of a dinner at the university cafeteria—bearable.
The dinner turned out to be bearable, too. Jennifer's best guess was that the university food service would soon fire whoever was responsible for cooking something edible. She took her Coke—what else, she said to herself, would a professor of Middle English drink?—out into the evening twilight and walked across campus slurping on it.
Once back in her office, she dutifully set to work. No one yet had come up with a computer program for grading essays. She scribbled marginal comments in red ink. At least Spanglish orthography corresponded to sound; she didn't have to deal with the erratic spelling that had plagued Ancient and Middle English.
Twilight faded to darkness around her. At just after 2100, a security guard phoned. "Sorry, Professor Logan," he said when he saw her face. "Just checking—the IR telltale showed somebody was in there. As long as it's you, there's no problem."
"I'm so glad," she said, but he had already switched off.
She tried to recover her train of thought. This student actually showed some grasp of how Piper had put together his future history, and she wanted to make sure she cleared up the gaps in the girl's understanding.
Just when she had reimmersed herself in the essay, the phone chimed again. This time, it was Ali Bakhtiar. "What do you want?" Jennifer said coldly.
Bakhtiar flushed. "I want to apologize again," he said. "I've just met your Foitani, and they're at least as impressive as you said they were. At least." He looked more than a little shaken. He didn't look shaken very often.
"Wait a minute. You met them? How did you meet them?"
"They came over here looking for you. They said they wanted to talk with you about the class. They didn't seem much interested in taking no for an answer, if you know what I mean. Finally I convinced them you'd moved out. I sent them on to your friend with the deep voice—Ellen Metchnikova, is that right?"
"Ella," Jennifer corrected absently. "Oh, God. She's not going to be very happy to see them. She has company tonight."
"I gathered that," Bakhtiar said. "I called her place to warn you they were coming, and she didn't much want to talk. She kept the vision blank, too. She snapped out where you were and switched off. So now you know."
"Oh, God," Jennifer said again. Ella would be a long time forgiving her for this, if she ever did. "Thanks, Ali, I guess. Better to know they're on the way."
"Listen, is there any way you could forget about moving out and come back here?" Bakhtiar said. "I really am sorry about what I said before, and I—"
"No, Ali," Jennifer said firmly. She'd already done all the thinking she needed to do about that one. "I'm sorry, too, but I don't think we were going anywhere anyhow. Just as well to break it off now. I hope we can still be friends, but that's it."
Bakhtiar scowled. "I hate when women say that. Anyway, though, I thought you ought to know about these creatures of yours. Good luck with them."
"They're not my creatures," Jennifer said, but Bakhtiar, like the security guard, didn't wait on the line to give her the last word. Shaking her head, she stared down at the essay on Piper. "Where was I?"
Just when she thought she remembered, the phone chimed again. She muttered something under her breath and jabbed a thumb at the accept button. The vision screen did not light. Ella, she thought, and Ella it was. "Jennifer, three blue behemoths are on their way to visit you."
"Thanks, Ella. Ali just phoned to warn me he'd sent them to your place. I'm sorry about that," Jennifer added.
"You ought to be," Ella snapped. "I don't like being interrupted when I'm right on the edge, and I especially don't like being interrupted twice."
"Oh, dear." Jennifer swallowed a giggle.
"If you weren't my friend . . . Well, these Foi-whatevers look big enough to have you for breakfast instead of talking, if that's what they want. Maybe you should keep your door locked after all."
"Don't be silly, Ella. Go back to Xavier, and I hope nobody interrupts you any more."
"Better not," Ella said darkly. "Good-bye." As it was the first one she'd got in three calls, Jennifer cherished that good-bye. She went back to work on the essay, hoping to finish grading it before the Foitani arrived.
A few minutes later, the elevator down the hall beeped. The Foitani, Jennifer thought. She put aside the paper; maybe it was never going to get finished. As it went back onto the pile, her brows came together. To get into the building this late, you were supposed to have an authorization card for the elevator to read. Then she shrugged. Maybe the Foitani had ridden up with someone who had a card. They knew her name, after all; a little explaining would be all they'd need.
Someone knocked on the door—knocked so high up on the door that it could only have been a battleball centerliner or a Foitan. She hadn't heard footsteps in the hall, but then the Foitani didn't wear shoes. They were very smooth and quiet for beings so large, as if they were closer to their hunting ancestors than humans were.
Jennifer opened the door and looked up and up. Thegun Thegun Nug towered over her; behind him stood the other two Foitani. Close up, they really were intimidating. Without intending to, she took half a step back before she said, "Hello. What can I do for you this evening?"
"You can come with us," Thegun Thegun Nug said.
The flat tone of his translator made Jennifer unsure just how he meant that. "I'd sooner talk here," she answered.
"It was not a conditional request," Thegun Thegun Nug said. Only then did she notice he held something in his left hand; anthropocentrism made her automatically look toward the right first.
The something sparked. That was all Jennifer remembered for a long time.
When she woke up, she was on a starship. The realization filtered in little by little, with her returning consciousness. Perhaps it took longer than it should have, for she had a headache like a thousand years of hangovers boiled down into a liter. Her trading stunner would quietly put a person out for an hour or two and leave her feeling fine when she woke up. Whatever the Foitani used didn't work that way. Oh my, no. The first time she tried to sit up, her head felt as if it would fall off. She rather wished it would, so she could forget it for a while.
After a bit, she began to notice things other than her pounding skull. The gravity was a good deal higher than Saugus's comfortable .85. It wasn't a planet's g-field, either. She didn't know how she knew the difference—no star traveler had ever succeeded in putting it into words—but she knew. The air was more than conditioned; it had the perfect flatness a good recycling plant gives.
Everything pointed to its being a Foitani ship, too. The chamber that held her was bigger and had a higher ceiling than humans were likely to build. Even the plain, foam pad on which she lay was outsized. The light from the ceiling panel had an oranger cast than humans would have used.
She looked around; she had to close her eyes several times at the pain that turning her head cost her. But for the bare mattress, the only things in the chamber with her were three plastic trash bags. She crawled over to them, moving slowly and carefully because of both the higher gravity and her headache. The trash bags held everything she'd had at her office, from her toothbrush to her computer to the complete contents of her desk, right down to paper clips and small change.
With a gasp of delight, she found her stunner. The delight quickly disappeared. Given that she was on a Foitani ship which she had no idea how to fly, how much good was the stunner likely to do her? She would have traded it in an instant for a year's supply of tampons. Since no one appeared with the trade offer, she clipped the stunner onto her belt.
Then she looked around for a place to relieve herself. Somehow, no one in her Middle English novels ever worried much about that. Neither had she, until she went on her first trading run. Squatting in the bushes brought her down to basic reality in a hurry.
She picked the corner farthest away from the foam-rubber mat. If the Foitani didn't come in and give her somewhere better to go before she had to empty her bladder, they could clean up after her themselves.
She was uncomfortable but not yet urgent when a door appeared in the far wall of her chamber: one second it wasn't there, the next second it was. Thegun Thegun Nug stepped inside. Of itself, her hand reached for her stunner. "That will do you no good," the Foitan said.
Suddenly she wasn't so sure. Maybe she couldn't fly this ship herself, but if she knocked Thegun Thegun Nug out and threatened to start carving him into strips a centimeter wide, his henchbeings might be persuaded to turn around and take her back to Saugus. Since that was the best notion she had, she pressed the trigger button.
Thegun Thegun Nug bared his teeth, but uncooperatively refused to fall over in a large, blue heap. "I said that would do you no good," he told her. "Your weapon makes me itch, but it does not make me sleep. Foitani stunners use a different ray."
Jennifer's gonging head gave anguished testimony to the truth of that. Back to her next priority, then. "Take me to whatever you people use for a toilet."
Thegun Thegun Nug took her. He even walked out of the room and left her alone. "My folk do not require privacy for this function, but we have learned humans prefer it." The door in the wall did not disappear, though.
"Thank you so much," Jennifer said, acid in her voice. "Why couldn't you have left me with my privacy back on Saugus, instead of kidnapping me?"
Her sarcasm rolled off Thegun Thegun Nug's blue skin. Through the opening in the wall, he answered, "You are welcome. And you would not have come with us of your own free will from the world you call Saugus; you were content there. But we have need of you, have need of your knowledge. Thus we took you."
"Thanks a lot," Jennifer muttered. The sanitary arrangements were simple enough: a couple of round holes in the floor, each close to half a meter wide. She squatted over one of them. When she was done, she called Thegun Thegun Nug, "Do you have anything I can use to wipe myself clean? Something soft and absorbent, I hope."
"I will see," the Foitan answered after a moment. "My species' orifices do not have this difficulty." Now the doorway vanished. The Foitan stayed away for a quarter of an hour. When he returned, he brought a length of gauzy cloth. "This is from our first-aid kit. Use it sparingly. It is all we can afford to give you."
"How long will the flight be?" she asked. Thegun Thegun Nug did not answer. She tried another string of questions. "What do you mean, you have need of my knowledge? How do you know what I know? And what kind of good is the knowledge of a professor of Middle English to you, anyhow?"
Thegun Thegun Nug chose to respond to one of those questions. "You were recommended to us by another human."
That only created more confusion for Jennifer. "I was? By whom?"
"By one with whom we have worked. He came across a situation beyond his expertise, and suggested you were the one to employ. From all we have seen of you, the probability that he is correct seems, if not high, then at least significant. He will also give you such aid as he may: he is still within Odern space."
"Odern?" The translator had left the word unchanged.
"Odern is my planet," Thegun Thegun Nug said. "It is one of the 127 worlds within our former sphere that still support Foitani life, one of the nineteen where starflight has been rediscovered. Before the Suicide Wars," he added, "we had settled on several thousand worlds; the precise number is still a matter of dispute among our scholars."
Jennifer shivered. She tried to imagine how humanity would war with ninety-five percent of its planets swept clean of life. She also wondered what the Foitani had found important enough to fight about on such an enormous scale. Humans had battled over religion with similar ferocity, but the rise of technology had weakened religion's hold on mankind. Maybe the Foitani had kept their fanaticism after they reached the stars.
Thegun Thegun Nug said, "Analysis of our rations has shown that you may safely eat them. You need have no concern on that score."
"How nice." Jennifer set hands on hips, took a deep breath. "You haven't given me a single reason why I should have the least bit of interest in doing anything for you. And I tell you this: kidnapping me like this has given me an awfully big reason not to."
"You have been on our payroll since the day we enrolled in your class, honored professor," Thegun Thegun Nug said. "We will pay standard journeyman merchant's wages, either in your currency or trade goods—your choice."
"I wasn't talking about money," Jennifer said. "And you have gall, too, putting me on your payroll for something I have less than no interest in doing."
For the first time outside the lecture hall, she succeeded in impressing the Foitan. "Money is not a sufficient inducement?" he said slowly. "I had been given to understand—and nothing I observed on Saugus diminished my understanding—that humans are a mercenary species, willing even, at times, to take arms against their own race or kin-group for the sake of profit."
"Some humans are. This human isn't. Damn you!" Jennifer heard her voice breaking, but could not do anything about it. "I was doing what I wanted to do, at last, after years of not being able to. What right do you have to take me away from that?"
"The right of species self-interest," Thegun Thegun Nug said, "which to us is paramount. I might also point out that, at need, physical coercion is available to force you to our will."
Jennifer's stomach turned to a small, chilly lump of ice. She felt her knees wobble. She was sure, though, that the more weakness she revealed to this inexorable alien, the worse off she would be. She looked up into the Foitan's round, black eyes. "How well do you think I'd do for you if you tortured me into submitting?"
"Less well than if you cooperate voluntarily, I admit. Torture, certainly, would be a last resort. I am, however, perfectly prepared to take away from you all your possessions and leave you alone in your chamber until ennui induces you to evince a more constructive attitude. My race has been waiting for twenty-eight thousand years. A fraction of another matters little to us."
She had no doubt Thegun Thegun Nug meant exactly what he said. Being bored into cooperation was attractive only in comparison to being tortured. The worst of it was, the trader part of her wanted to go along with the Foitan. No, the traitor part, she thought. But how many merchants had won the chance to trade with the Foitani? If she looked at it the right way—the wrong way, the professorial part of her insisted—that was what she'd be doing, trading her knowledge for their goods, if she did know what the aliens thought she knew. If she couldn't skin them on that deal, she didn't deserve to be a journeyman.
"All right," she said. "If you think I'm worth risking an interstellar war to get, I'll do what I can for you—provided you let me go after I'm done."
"Certainly," Thegun Thegun Nug said at once. "As for risking war with humans, I will only say it is highly unsafe for ships flown by other species to enter Foitani space unescorted. It is not altogether safe for our own ships to fly. Many weapons from the Suicide Wars are in free orbit throughout our former domain, and hard vacuum is an excellent preservative."
"Wonderful," Jennifer muttered. Now all she had to do was worry about hitting a mine that had been floating free since the days when Cro-Magnon man chased woolly mammoths between glaciers back on Earth.
"It is not wonderful, but it is a fact," Thegun Thegun Nug said; none of the three Foitani had much of a sense of humor. "Our detectors should suffice to get us back to Odern, however."
"They'd better," Jennifer said. "If we blow up, I'll never forgive you."
Thegun Thegun Nug started to answer, then stopped and seemed to think better of it. At last he said, "Come. I will return you to your chamber."
"What happens the next time I need to relieve myself?"
"One of us will escort you here. Were our situations reversed, would you trust me unescorted on a human ship?"
Jennifer wanted to say she wouldn't trust the Foitan no matter what. That did not seem politic at the moment, regardless of how true it was. Without a word, she followed Thegun Thegun Nug out of the toilet chamber and back to her own. She thought hard about annoying her captors with toilet calls at every hour of the day and night. With some species, she might have tried it. Her best guess, though, was that the Foitani would simply stop coming after a while, leaving her to foul her chamber. She decided not to risk it.
Aissur Aissur Rus brought her a plastic pouch of food a couple of hours later. She looked at it without enthusiasm. It resembled nothing so much as dry dog food. "This will nourish you, and should cause no allergic responses," the Foitan said.
Of the three aliens, Jennifer thought Aissur Aissur Rus the most open. Hoping he would answer where Thegun Thegun Nug had not, she asked, "Why did you people grab me? What do you think I can do for you, anyhow?"
"As a matter of fact, taking you was my idea," he said.
She stared at him. After liking him the best, hearing that jolted her. "What is it you want from me?" she repeated.
"One of your human sages once said, 'I am a midget, standing on the shoulders of giants.' When we Foitani of the present days look at the deeds of the Great Ones before the Suicide Wars, we are midgets trying to see up to the shoulders of giants. Perhaps you can help us do that. If not, perhaps you can help us see around the giants' bodies to a new way."
Jennifer frowned. Thegun Thegun Nug had evaded her questions. Aissur Aissur Rus seemed to answer openly enough, but the answer did not mean anything to her. "Go away and let me eat," she told him.
"I did not know you required privacy for that," he said.
"I don't require it, but I'd be grateful. I have a whole lot of things I need to sort out in my mind right now. Please."
Aissur Aissur Rus studied her. The Foitan's eyes had no sclera, no iris, no pupil. They were completely black and completely unreadable. At last, without a word, he made the doorway appear in her wall, walked through it, and made it disappear after him.
She ate. The coarse, crunchy lumps in the plastic pouch tasted like what she thought dog food ought to taste like; they came from something that had been meat quite a while ago. She made herself go on eating till she was full.
When she was done, she looked up at the ceiling and said, "I would like something to drink, please." The Foitani had to have electronic eyes and ears in the chamber.
Sure enough, Aissur Aissur Rus brought her a jug a few minutes later. "This is pure water," he said. "You may drink it safely."
"Thank you," Jennifer said. "May I also have water for washing?"
"Perhaps when you go to the toilets, so it will run down into a disposal hole," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "How often do you usually wash? The human custom is once a day, is it not? I suppose that might be arranged."
"You might have thought beforehand about what I'd need," Jennifer said.
"We are not used to considering the needs of other species. It is not the Foitani way, and does not come easy to us."
"Really? I never would have noticed."
Irony bounced off Aissur Aissur Rus as if he were iron-plated. When he saw Jennifer had no more to say, he turned and left as abruptly as he had before. She drank the jug dry. The water was cold, and had the faint, unpleasant untaste of distilling. It did help to ease her headache.
The jug was made of soft plastic. She flung it against the wall nonetheless. It denied her the good satisfying crash she craved, falling to the ground with a dull thump. She walked over to it and kicked it as hard as she could. That helped, but not enough. She found a pen, drew a couple of black circles on the side of the jug to stand for Foitani eyes. She kicked it again. "Better," she said.