Jennifer's computer insisted the flight to Odern lasted twenty-three days and some hours after the aliens snatched her away from Saugus. She thought it felt more like twenty-three years. By the time the ship landed, she wished all the Foitani had succeeded in blasting themselves to hell and gone—and then another twenty kilometers farther, for luck.
For one thing, her period arrived while she was in space, with no possibility of privacy whatever. She didn't much feel like explaining to the aliens how her plumbing worked, but she didn't have much choice, either, not if she wanted to keep her clothes clean. This time, they gave her all the absorbent cloth she wanted without arguing; menstruation, evidently, was one aspect of humanity about which they hadn't informed themselves.
"You wanted me, you got me—just the way I am," she told Thegun Thegun Nug.
"As you say." The Foitan hesitated. "You are certain you are not wounded?"
"I'm certain."
"As you say," Thegun Thegun Nug repeated. Though his translator sounded flat as ever, he did not seem convinced. Squeamish, are you? Jennifer wondered. She wished she could break out in green, smelly spots, just to revolt him.
For another, she got thoroughly sick of kibbles and water as a standard diet. "You knew you were going to kidnap me," she snarled at Dargnil Dargnil Lin. "Why didn't you buy—or even steal—something edible for me?"
"These rations are both edible and nutritious," Dargnil Dargnil Lin answered primly. "They are adapted for human needs from our standard spacecraft fare."
"You mean you eat this stuff all the time when you're in space?" Jennifer asked. When Dargnil Dargnil Lin waved a hand in front of his face in the Foitani equivalent of a nod, she said, "That's the best argument against spaceflight I ever heard." Dargnil Dargnil Lin left quite suddenly. Maybe, Jennifer thought, I've managed to annoy him for a change. She hoped so.
The one good thing about the flight was that it met none of the infernal devices left over from the Suicide Wars. Having to go that far to find something good brought the rest of the journey into perfect perspective for Jennifer.
She did not even know the ship had touched down until all three Foitani appeared outside the disappearing doorway. "Come with us," Thegun Thegun Nug said.
"How can I say no?" Jennifer murmured. Not only did he have his two immense comrades to help enforce his wishes, he was also carrying that vicious Foitani stunner. Getting shot with it was better than dying, but only a little.
The Foitani led her in the direction away from the lavatory. That was her first hint something unusual had happened. Any hope she had of seeing more of the ship quickly went by the wayside; one stretch of blank corridor looked just like another. But the chamber they went into had big space suits in a rack to one side; in a human ship, that would have made it the air lock.
Thegun Thegun Nug touched a panel on the far wall. Another doorway opened. Sunlight poured in. So did fresh air. After more than three weeks of the recycled product, it smelled amazingly sweet. The doorway framed buildings and green hills. The green hills of Odern, Jennifer thought. She shook her head. Rhysling would not have approved.
Thegun Thegun Nug turned and went backward out the door. Since he didn't fall, Jennifer figured he was going down a ladder. Aissur Aissur Rus followed him. "Now you," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said. "I will come last." Since he also had a stunner, Jennifer did not argue.
The way down proved not to be a ladder, but rather rungs set into the side of the spacecraft. The rungs were made for people the size of Foitani, which is to say, they were much too far apart for Jennifer. She was enough meters off the concrete below to get nervous at the thought of missing one, which did nothing to improve her grip.
"Hurry, can't you?" Dargnil Dargnil Lin called from the air lock.
"No, I can't," she said through clenched teeth. By the time she reached the ground, sweat was pouring from her armpits, too. This was a lot harder than going down the wall on L'Rau. She wanted to stand where she was and catch her breath, but from the way Dargnil Dargnil Lin was descending behind her, he didn't care whether he landed on her or not. She skipped aside in a hurry.
Once on the ground, Dargnil Dargnil Lin reached up and slapped the side of the ship. The rungs vanished, leaving the side smooth once more. It had to be memory metal, Jennifer thought. On human worlds, the stuff was a toy. The Foitani would appear to have exploited the technology more intensively.
As soon as the rungs disappeared, her captors seemed to forget all about her. They faced the low, rounded, green hills behind the spaceport, bowed themselves almost double. Still bowed, they began a slow, mumbling chant. Their translators picked up some of it for Jennifer. "Great Ones, look kindly on us. We return to Odern our homeworld, faithful always to our mission to regain the glory you once knew. Though earthgrip holds you now, we shall redeem you. May your glory return speedily, Great Ones, speedily. So may it be."
"You worship the Foitani who lived before the Suicide Wars?" Jennifer asked when Thegun Thegun Nug and his companions decided to notice her again.
"Not worship so much as respect," Aissur Aissur Rus said, "and truly the deeds of the Great Ones deserve—no, demand—respect. The more we learn of them, the more we seek to emulate them, to restore our sphere to the grandeur it once knew."
To bring about the conditions that caused the Suicide Wars, whatever those were, Jennifer glossed mentally, with a slight internal chill. Aloud, she said, "Then you don't really believe the Foitani you call the Great Ones live inside those hills?'"
"Not now," Aissur Aissur Rus said. Before Jennifer could do more than start to frown, the Foitan went on, "But once they did. Those are not natural hills. Once a city stood there. We've mined it for millennia."
Jennifer glanced over to the hills once more, this time with fresh eyes. They still looked big enough and permanent enough to have been in place for millions of years. And this was after—how long had Thegun Thegun Nug said?—twenty-eight thousand years, that was it, of neglect and erosion. She tried to imagine the towers that must have existed before earth and plants and time had their way with them, tried and failed.
"Odern was but a minor world in our former sphere," Aissur Aissur Rus added. "Others have remains far grander and far better preserved. But most of those worlds are dead, of course."
"Of course," Jennifer echoed softly. That internal chill grew and spread as she thought about what living as the scattered survivors of the galaxy's biggest slaughterhouse had to be like for the Foitani. No wonder they didn't have much of a sense of humor.
"Now come with us," Thegun Thegun Nug said. "We have reported our success to our kin-group chiefs. They and we will presently acquaint you with the other human in our employ."
The other human—Jennifer had forgotten about him. Of itself, her hand went to the stunner she still wore on her belt. It was no more than an annoyance to the Foitani, but the first time she saw this other human, she intended to flatten him—and to kick him while he was down, too.
The spaceport tarmac was full of big, blocky-looking Foitani ships. A couple of kilometers away, almost hidden by one of them, she saw a vessel that had to be human-built. It was the sort of medium-sized, medium-slow ship a trader who worked solo might fly. "He'll be so low, all right, when I'm through with him," she said under her breath.
Like the ships, the spaceport buildings were on what was to her a heroic scale. Foitani who carried things that looked a lot more lethal than stunners stood outside doorways. They touched their left knees to the ground as Thegun Thegun Nug and his comrades went by. Even from that position of respect, their fathomless black eyes bored into Jennifer. She wondered if she really did prefer these dispassionate stares of suspicion to the longing glances human males so often sent her way. Maybe not, she decided.
Inside the administrative center or whatever it was, Foitani tramped purposefully down corridors wide and tall enough to echo. Some were armed like the guards outside; others spoke into computers. They all went about their business with the serious intensity that seemed a hallmark of the species.
Thegun Thegun Nug stood outside a place marked by writing in the angular Foitani script. He spoke to the air. Jennifer did not know what he said; somewhere between the ship and here, he and his fellows had turned off their translators. The air answered, as unintelligibly. Thegun Thegun Nug spoke again. One of those unnerving now-you-see-it, now-you-don't doors opened in front of him.
Jennifer had never been inside a spaceport operations center, but every third holovid drama seemed set in one, so she had some idea what they were like. This was definitely the Foitani version of such a nerve center. Big blue aliens talked into microphones, listened to oddly shaped headsets that accommodated their erectile ears, and watched holographic displays. For a few seconds, no one paid any attention to Thegun Thegun Nug and his comrades.
Then a Foitan spotted Jennifer. He waved her captors toward what looked like another blank wall. By now she had learned blank walls didn't necessarily stay blank among the Foitani. Sure enough, this one didn't. A door appeared, this time opening onto what had to be the local equivalent of a boss's office. For one thing, it boasted carpeting, the first Jennifer had seen on Odern. For another, the desk behind which a Foitan stood seemed about as long and wide as the flight deck of an ancient aircraft carrier.
"You will pay your respects to Pawasar Pawasar Ras." Thegun Thegun Nug turned his translator back on as soon as the office door disappeared behind his party. He pointed to the Foitan behind the desk.
Jennifer nodded. "Hello, Pawasar Pawasar Ras." If I had a stepladder, I'd spit in your eye.
"I greet you, human," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said; Jennifer suspected that meant he was too important an executive to be bothered with remembering her name. "I trust your journey here was of adequate comfort."
You're pretty trusting, then, aren't you? was what she wanted to say. Since the Foitani who had kidnapped her already knew exactly how she felt about that, she kept her mouth shut.
Dargnil Dargnil Lin nudged her. A nudge from a Foitan was almost enough to knock her off her feet. "Answer the honored kin-group leader when he questions you," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said.
"I survived the journey," she said. Let this honcho make what he wanted of that.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "You are doubtless of the opinion that you have seen a sufficiency of our kind." Jennifer's eyes opened wide: this was the first Foitan she'd met who had any of what humans reckoned common sense. Maybe it was rare enough in his species to make possessing it an automatic ticket to an important job like his. He went on, "Accordingly, I will let the human who has been working in cooperation with us explain the predicament he and we have encountered."
He touched something on his desk. A door appeared in a different wall of the office. Jennifer waited grimly. Whoever had set her up for this would have a lot more explaining to do than Pawasar Pawasar Ras thought. He might even find himself in a brand new predicament of his own.
A man dressed in trader coveralls came through the doorway. Jennifer stared. She'd expected to know the fellow who had betrayed her. She'd never expected he'd be someone she liked. "Bernard!" The academic part of her dredged up a stupid Middle English joke. "What's a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?"
Bernard Greenberg looked sheepish, although the top of his head was devoid of wool. "Hello, Jennifer," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't think they'd just up and grab you."
"Well, they bloody well did," she said, then added bitterly, "Were you so angry at me for going off to the university instead of staying a trader that you decided to get even? This isn't even; this is overkill."
"No, no, no." He plucked at his salt-and-pepper beard in distress. "It's not like that, Jennifer; really it's not. I thought they'd consult you. When they told me they were going to bring you here, I tried as hard as I could to talk them out of it. But their ship had already left for Saugus by then, and even if it hadn't, it's not easy to talk a Foitan out of anything. You may have noticed that."
"Now that you mention it, yes," she said with a sidelong glance at Thegun Thegun Nug. She studied Bernard Greenberg and decided she'd made a mistake. "I should be the one who says she's sorry, Bernard. It's not your fault—not all your fault, anyway. I just hit out at the first thing I could reach without climbing onto a box." She looked at Thegun Thegun Nug again. His translator was working, but if he caught what she'd meant as well as what she'd said, he gave no sign of it.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "Enough, if you please; this is not an appropriate time or place for social intercourse. Human Bernard, be so good as to define the problem for your colleague here." He knows Bernard's name, Jennifer thought with what she knew to be a completely irrational stab of jealousy.
"If I could define the problem, honored kin-group leader Pawasar Pawasar Ras, I wouldn't need a colleague," Greenberg answered. Pawasar Pawasar Ras bared his teeth. Jennifer knew that was only a Foitani frown, but it carried more impact than anything a human could do. Greenberg turned back to Jennifer. "You know the Foitani are past-worshipers and scavengers both."
She nodded. "Given what they did to themselves so long ago, it's hardly surprising."
"No, it isn't. The local population on Odern has mined the planet pretty thoroughly, when you consider how much of what used to be here has to have rusted away or whatever over the past umpty-thousand years."
Not enough, Jennifer thought. By the way Greenberg's mouth narrowed and lengthened ever so slightly—it wasn't a smile; it wasn't even close to a smile—Jennifer knew he'd picked up what she was thinking. No nonhuman would have noticed a change in his expression. She said, "I'm still not clear what this has to do with me."
"Scavenging turned into a whole different game for the local Foitani when they reinvented the hyperdrive," Greenberg said. "They had some idea which stars held planets their species had settled once upon a time. When they went out to look at those planets, they found that a lot of them were dead. Some had no Foitani left, some had no life at all—sterile. Fission bombs, diseases, asteroid strikes, poison gas—I don't know what all. The old imperial Foitani—"
"The Great Ones," Pawasar Pawasar Ras corrected.
"The Great Ones, I mean—well, they seem to have had a more advanced technology than we do now. They were great at killing, that's certain. And on a lot of those dead worlds, the toys they left behind survived in much better shape than on a place like Odern, where everything got reused over and over again as the world was sliding into barbarism. Now, on one of the planets that used to be part of the empire, they've come across something they can't handle."
"They said that themselves," Jennifer said. "They didn't explain it, though—they haven't explained much of anything. So what exactly are you talking about?"
"They've found an artifact they cannot try to use and stay sane. If they're within ten or twelve kilometers of it, they can't help trying to use it, either, whatever the hell it is. I've seen dozens of the poor bastards who tried. They aren't pretty. The ones on the fringes of the effect around the thing can fight the compulsion, but if they get too close, they're doomed. Finally they lost enough people to make them fortify the whole area. But they were still curious, so they hired a non-Foitan—me—to see what he could find out."
"And you went crazy, too," Jennifer said, "or you never would have given them my name."
Pawasar Pawasar Ras's eyes swung sharply toward Greenberg when Thegun Thegun Nug's translator turned that into the local language. "Does the other human speak accurately, human Bernard? Has the Great Unknown"—even with the translator, Jennifer could hear the capital letters—"affected your psychological integrity?"
"I do not think so, honored kin-group leader Pawasar Pawasar Ras," Greenberg answered. Jennifer had finally managed to get his goat; he gave her a dirty look as he went on, "You may have noticed that humans use irony more than Foitani do."
"This practice of saying one thing while meaning another is rank, manifest foolishness," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.
"As may be," Greenberg answered mildly; he sounded used to soothing Pawasar Pawasar Ras every so often. He turned back to Jennifer: "I couldn't find anything about this artifact that would make anybody go insane, human or Foitan. If it's not a physical effect, what's left? Best bet, I figured, was something cultural. I've been a trader a long time; I know something about that sort of thing. But you know more. Not only do you have your trader background, you've got a working knowledge of all the hypothetical cases your old-time writers invented. And the more I dealt with this thing, the more hypothetical everything about it looked, if you know what I mean. So I mentioned your name to the Foitani."
The worst part was, it made sense. Jennifer tried to stay angry, but failed. She let out a long sigh. "And they took the ball and shot it toward the far goal," she said. "That does seem to be the way they do things."
"It certainly does." Greenberg cocked his head at her. "Shot the ball toward the far goal? I didn't know you followed battleball."
"An acquired taste. It's wearing off, believe me. Now that I'm here, there isn't any good way back without going along, is there?" She turned to Pawasar Pawasar Ras. "All right, where next?"
"To the world Gilver," he answered with almost robotic literality. "This is the world upon which the Great Unknown is situated."
"Any chance for research first?" she asked: she was an academic before anything else. "You've been studying your ancestors ever since the, ah, Suicide Wars. Did they leave behind any records that might help you understand this thing?"
"That is an intelligent question." Pawasar Pawasar Ras's ears twitched, so he was genuinely pleased. "We have not found any data related to the world Gilver that pertain to it. Dargnil Dargnil Lin here can assist you in examining our data bases, if you think that would be valuable. He is expert in the ancient archives."
"I would like to see them, yes," Jennifer said. She wondered if Dargnil Dargnil Lin was an exception, or if steady, solid, serious types among the Foitani gravitated toward jobs like archivist as they did with humans.
"See to it, Dargnil Dargnil Lin," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.
"It shall be done, honored kin-group leader," Dargnil Dargnil Lin replied.
Striking while the iron was hot and the big boss in a cooperative frame of mind, Jennifer said, "I saw Bernard Greenberg's ship here at this spaceport, honored kin-group leader." If she was going to butter up Pawasar Pawasar Ras, might as well get him good and greasy. "May I stay aboard it? A human ship truly would be a more proper base for me." And thanks to you, I'll never, ever keep a dog.
"If the human Bernard does not object, you may do this," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.
"I don't object," Greenberg said at once.
"Then you may make those arrangements, human," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said to Jennifer—he still didn't have her name. Though Foitani eyes were next to impossible to read, she felt his gaze intensify as he went on, "Do not think this will permit you two humans to plan a joint escape. Aside from the dangers inherent for non-Foitani flying through space once in the Great Ones' sphere, we have our own tracker and explosive device secured in the—the—what is the name of your ship, human Bernard?"
"The Harold Meeker, honored kin-group leader," Greenberg said.
"Yes, the Harold Meeker. Very well, then, human, ah—"
"Jennifer." Took him long enough to ask, Jennifer thought.
"Yes, Jennifer. You may proceed, then, human Jennifer, with your researches for a period not to exceed, ah, twenty Odern days, Dargnil Dargnil Lin to assist you as necessary. Then you and human Bernard shall travel to Gilver to continue in the attempt to analyze the Great Unknown. Thegun Thegun Nug, Aissur Aissur Rus, Dargnil Dargnil Lin, and I shall accompany you there."
Jennifer had expected the other three Foitani to go offworld with her if she left Odern. They were plainly her keepers. But Pawasar Pawasar Ras surprised her by including himself. From what she knew of big-wheel executives, they didn't often inflict themselves on actual research sites. "Why you?" she asked him.
"The Great Unknown is my project," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, as if that explained everything. To him, it seemed to. To Jennifer, it showed the Foitani definitely were not human—not that she hadn't noticed that already.
Jennifer finished a salami sandwich. The meat was greasy, the bread bland. The mustard was tangier than she cared for. She washed down the sandwich with a glass of vin extremely ordinaire. After Foitani rations, it all tasted wonderful. "Thank you, Bernard," she said. "I just may live. I may even decide I want to."
"Sorry there isn't more and better," Greenberg answered. "I've been in Foitani space long enough that I'm starting to run low myself."
"And I'll make you run out all the faster. I'm sorry."
"Don't be. You always did apologize too much; do you know that? If I hadn't opened my big mouth, you'd still be happily back on Saugus. Sharing real food with you is the least I can do to pay you back. We won't starve on what the Foitani eat—"
"However much we wish we would," Jennifer finished for him.
He studied her, one eyebrow raised. After Ali Bakhtiar's virtuoso displays of superciliosity, this was amateur night. The master trader said, "You've changed a bit since we flew together a few years ago. Then you wouldn't have interrupted or made sour jokes."
She shrugged. "I've finished growing up. I find I can manage all right for myself. Now to business, if you don't mind, because I don't want to spend one more second here than I have to. First off, is your ship bugged?"
"I assume so. Pity we don't know some arcane foreign languages we could use to talk privately," Greenberg said. Jennifer gave a rueful nod. Nobody bothered to learn to speak foreign languages these days, not with oral translator programs so widely available. She supposed she could make a stab at speaking Middle English, but the Foitani were more likely to understand her than Greenberg was.
"What is this Great Unknown thing, anyway?" she asked.
"If I knew, I would tell you," he answered. "If I knew, we could go home, come to that. But I don't know. I just hope we'll be able to find out. I keep worrying about what the Foitani may do if we can't—and we may not be able to. Nobody who isn't a Foitan has any real notion of what their ancestors were capable of, back before the Suicide Wars. I told you, though, it's pretty clear they were technologically ahead of where we are now."
"That won't help us understand them." Jennifer slowly shook her head. "They may have been ahead of us technically, but socially! Think of spending however many thousands of years they took to build up their empire, and then to blow it to bits, and themselves with it." She shook her head again, this time in horror. The Foitani seemed to have lived out every human's darkest nightmares.
Greenberg said, "To this day, they don't know why they started to fight. But once they got going, they did a good, thorough job, which is typical of the species. Pawasar Pawasar Ras says they undoubtedly intended to kill themselves off altogether; in a crazy sort of way, he thinks less of them for failing."
"The worst part of it is, now that I've been around Foitani a while, I can almost see the logic in that." Jennifer started to say something more, but found herself yawning instead.
"You may have more privacy aboard one of their ships, or in the spaceport," Greenberg said. "You'd certainly have more room. This isn't a big ship at all."
"If you want me to leave, I will. Otherwise I'd sooner stay here," Jennifer said. "I don't need a whole lot of privacy from you, do I? After all, we've flown together before."
"I'll set you up with a foam pad in the storeroom." Greenberg spread his hands. "I'm sorry, but that's the best I can do if you want any room to yourself."
"Drag the pad in here tonight, would you? After getting lifted the way I did, just being close to somebody human will feel good. I don't think you're going to molest me."
Greenberg grinned lopsidedly. "Tempting as the notion is—no." He rummaged in a compartment, pulled out the promised foam pad. Except for being smaller, it was identical to the one on which she had awakened inside the Foitani ship. Greenberg rummaged some more, let out a grunt of triumph. "I thought I had a spare pillow in here. And here's a blanket, too."
Jennifer took them. "Thanks. But do you know what the biggest pleasure being aboard your ship will be for me?" Without waiting for Greenberg to reply, she went on, "Having a toilet that fits my behind."
He laughed at that. "Yes, I've seen what the Foitani use. They'd be especially bad for you, wouldn't they?" He waved toward the refresher cubicle. "Help yourself."
"I don't mind if I do." She hesitated, then asked, "You wouldn't by any chance have tampons or anything like that?"
"I don't know if there are any in the sanitary supplies or not. I never needed to find out until now."
"Well, if you don't, I suppose I can improvise something or other. I did it once; I can do it again."
When she got out, Greenberg went in. She stripped down to her underpants, gave her grimy outfit an unhappy look, and then brightened—the Harold Meeker would be able to get clothes clean, not just stir the dirt around as she had been doing. She slid under the blanket.
Greenberg surprised her by stooping next to the foam pad and reaching out to touch her shoulder. She stiffened. Was he going to make advances now? She'd made love with him a few times on their first trip together, on the way home from L'Rau. But this was not the right time, not for her. She tried to figure out how to tell him that without hurting him or making him angry.
But all he wanted was to apologize again. "Jennifer, I'm so sorry. You should be back on your campus, doing what you wanted to do."
"It can't be helped," she said. Her dreams of elaborate revenge had collapsed when she found out how the Foitani learned of her, and from whom. While they lasted, though, they'd helped sustain her. With nothing in their place, she felt very tired. "Just let me sleep."
"Fair enough." Greenberg rose; Jennifer's eyes closed even as he did so. She heard cloth whisper when he pulled off his coveralls, then the muffled sound his body made pressing against the sofa bed. He must have touched the light switch, for the darkness behind her eyelids got blacker. "Good night," he said.
She thought she answered him, but she was never sure afterward.
Dargnil Dargnil Lin stood in front of a workstation. It had all the elements of the ones with which Jennifer was familiar—holoscreen, mike, keyboard, and printer—yet was in aggregate nothing like them. The Foitani had their own engineering traditions, which owed nothing to those of mankind.
"I suppose you will want to begin with our records pertaining to the Great Unknown," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said.
"I'd rather have more background first, if I could," Jennifer answered. "Can you show me something basic and general about your race as it was before the Suicide Wars?"
"Your time for research is limited." The translator was expressionless as always, but Jennifer thought she heard a sniff in the Foitan's voice. She looked up at him without saying anything. He bared his teeth at her. She kept waiting. At last he said, "Let it be as you wish, then." He spoke to the workstation. The screen lit. Dargnil Dargnil Lin said, "This is a history such as our adolescents use."
"Good." The video had more text to it than a comparable human one would have used, and Jennifer could not read the Foitani written language. But there were still plenty of pictures, and Dargnil Dargnil Lin's translator turned the soundtrack into Spanglish for her. She watched and listened and spoke low-voiced notes into her computer.
On a historical star atlas, she watched the empire of the Great Ones spread. The sound track attributed their unbroken run of success to their inherent superiority over all the races they encountered. She wondered whether the species was biologically programmed to think that way, the Foitani of Odern were imitating their ancestors, or if they were projecting their own attitudes back onto the Great Ones.
A few minutes of watching made her toss out that last possibility. The Foitani of long ago had definitely been in the habit of killing off races that proved obstreperous. They did not bother to hide or even to go out of the way to justify genocide; they simply went about it, with second thoughts as few and far between as if they were swatting flies.
"Can you stop the tape for a moment?" Jennifer said. Dargnil Dargnil Lin could. Jennifer asked him, "Would your people act that way again if you were strong enough?"
"Probably," he said. "We have not reached the heights the Great Ones achieved, however, and races such as your own appear more potent than any they faced. Thus we have had to begin to learn to treat with other species rather than simply rolling over them. It is not easy for us."
Jennifer bit back the sardonic retort that automatically came to mind. The Foitani could not help being what they were. Expecting aliens to act like humans was the easiest way for a trader to get into trouble. Moreover, mankind could not boast a spotless record among the stars, though humans had perpetrated their worst acts of savagery on themselves.
The same seemed true of the Foitani. The screen Jennifer was watching suddenly turned a dazzling white. She staggered back, hands to her eyes, as if caught by the blast of a real explosion. When she looked again, a phrase in the Foitani written language filled the screen. "The Suicide Wars," Dargnil Dargnil Lin read for her.
"I'd suspected that, yes," Jennifer murmured. Far more rapidly than it had grown, the Foitani empire crumbled. Most of the stars that had filled the holovid map went dark. A handful, scattered at random across two or three thousand light-years, kept glowing red. An even smaller handful burned with a yellow light.
"Those yellow dots are the worlds of our species that have relearned starflight," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said. "On the red, Foitani also survive, but in a state of savagery."
"But why did it happen?" Jennifer asked. "What made you fight like that?" The tape hadn't offered a clue; its narration merely recorded the event without analyzing what had brought it on.
"I cannot answer for certain, nor could anyone else on Odern," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said. "There are speculations, but who can truly hope to see into the minds of the Great Ones? Only when we can match their deeds will we be worthy to comprehend their thoughts."
Jennifer's mouth twisted in discontent. The Foitani were too busy venerating their past to try seriously to understand it. "May I speak without causing offense through ignorance of your customs?" she asked, one of the standard questions every trader learned.
"Speak," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said.
"If the Great Ones were as magnificent in every way as you make them out to be, why did they ever go and fight the Suicide Wars in the first place?"
"For reasons of their own, reasons which surely reflected their greatness," Dargnil Dargnil Lin answered. Jennifer filled her lungs to shout at him; that was less than no answer, for it shunted aside thought rather than inspiring it. But the Foitan was not through. "Some among us have speculated that the Great Unknown contains the full and proper response to your question, and that our failure to grasp merely reflects our degeneracy in comparison to our ancestors."
"That's—" Jennifer stopped. How did she know it was nonsense? She was no Foitan—thank God, she added to herself. She tried again. "That's interesting. What evidence do your scholars apply in support of it?" The idea of the Foitani of Odern as decadent descendants of the true race had a nasty appeal to her, not least because it made their behavior in snatching her the product of debased minds.
Dargnil Dargnil Lin said, "I will show you a tape and let you draw your own conclusions."
"Show me several tapes, ones with differing points of view. How can I decide what is true on the basis of a single report?"
"You are a scholar," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said, as if reminding himself. "Very well, let it be as you wish." For the next several hours, Jennifer viewed records of the Foitani discovery of the Great Unknown, and of speculations about it. When she was through for the day, she mentally apologized to the big, blue aliens. She'd thought them too staid to produce much in the way of crackpottery. Now she knew better. Given the proper stimulus, they could be as bizarre as any human ever born.
The Great Unknown was proper enough. She studied orbital views of it, then pictures taken at long range from the ground, and finally close-ups. "Those were obtained by remote-controlled cameras," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said of the last batch. "We have a great store of data, as you see. They do not lead us toward understanding, however."
The old Foitani seemed to have gone in for monumental architecture in a big way. Massive colonnades led toward an enormous column that leaped most of a kilometer into Gilver's sky. No weeds, no undergrowth marred the Great Unknown or its precinct, even after twenty-eight thousand years. Nor had Gilver's tectonic forces damaged either tower or colonnades. They might have been raised yesterday rather than in the late Pleistocene.
"Why didn't this thing get bombed along with the rest of the planet?" Jennifer asked.
"Something else we do not know," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said. "For your knowledge base, though, you should also observe some of the first of our people to come close enough to the artifact to feel its effect." He spoke into the microphone again.
After a few seconds of viewing, Jennifer had to turn away. Greenberg had been right; the Foitani who got too close to the Great Unknown weren't pretty. They hadn't just been damaged—they'd been destroyed. They drooled and shook and sucked on their toes and relieved themselves wherever they happened to be. Their muzzled faces gave not the slightest indication of surviving intelligence, nor could Dargnil Dargnil Lin's translator make sense of the shrieks and growls that sprang from their throats.
"This happened to all your people who got too close?" Jennifer said, gulping.
"All. The precise radius at which the Great Unknown began to grip them varied with the individual, but within it no one was safe."
"Hmm." Jennifer thought for a while. "And we know this didn't happen with Bernard. Does it happen to Foitani from worlds other than Odern who come to Gilver?"
"We do not know," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said. "We do not want to find out. To an alien such as yourself, all who still inhabit the Great Ones' sphere may rightly be known as Foitani. Well and good. But those who spring from other worlds are untrustworthy at best and outright abomination at the worst. Only we of Odern are the true descendants of the original race."
"Oh, my aching head," Jennifer said softly.
"Your head still distresses you? Perhaps it is an aftereffect of the ray Thegun Thegun Nug used to stun you. I hope you have an analgesic available."
"Never mind," Jennifer said, not surprised the translator had been too literal. All the surviving Foitani had been separated from one another for more than twenty thousand years. No wonder they'd have trouble getting along. After so much time, they wouldn't even all be of the same species any more. She asked, "When you deal with these other Foitani, what language do you use?"
"That of the Great Ones, so far as we understand it. It is the only speech we have in common, after all. Some worlds, among which Odern takes the lead, also use this tongue in everyday life in place of our former degenerate jargons. Others barbarously insist on maintaining the primitive languages they employed before coming into contact with more civilized Foitani."
"All right; thanks. I think I've seen enough for today, if that's all right with you." What with the spectacle of completely deranged Foitani and the realization that the Foitani of Odern were just one small part of a much bigger puzzle, Jennifer was sure she'd seen enough.
Bernard Greenberg clapped a rueful hand to his forehead when she told him what she'd learned. He said, "I should have thought of that. It's too easy to forget how long they spent isolated on their own planets."
"With luck, it won't matter," Jennifer answered. "After all, the Foitani from Odern are the only ones who know about Gilver, so they'll be the only ones we have to worry about."
"I suppose so," Greenberg said. "But if they learned of the place from records they dug up, there's always the chance some other bunch will, too."
Jennifer had tried not to think about that. "Bite your tongue."
The more she researched the Great Unknown, the more she concluded that was a good name for it. Fusion bombs had all but sterilized Gilver. They'd fallen all around the mysterious artifact, but not a single one had landed inside what she'd taken to calling the radius of insanity. The planet's ecosystem was still struggling to repair itself; parts of that continent had become almost lush with greenery. Within the radius of insanity, nothing grew. Mere life, apparently, was not allowed to disturb the Great Unknown.
"I can imagine achieving that effect for a limited time, with periodic maintenance," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said when Jennifer asked him about it. "But to continue since the Suicide Wars . . . no, human Jennifer, it is but another of the wonders the Great Ones left behind for us to marvel at."
Jennifer was sick of marveling at the Great Ones. She wanted answers, and the Foitani records on Odern held precious few of them. "I never would have believed it," she said when her last allotted research day was done, "but I'll be glad to go to Gilver, just to try and figure out what's really going on."
"More power to you, if you can do that on Gilver," Greenberg answered. "If you think Odern is boring, you haven't seen anything yet."
"I haven't seen anything of Odern, except the spaceport and the library. Neither one of them is likely to drive Earth or Redford's Star off the tourist itineraries."
He smiled at her. "You've changed; do you know that? You're not nearly the same person you were when you flew with me aboard the Flying Festoon."
Jennifer mentally prodded herself. "It hasn't been that many years, Bernard. I don't feel different in any particular way."
"You are, though. Back then, when anybody said anything to you, you were as like as not to pull back into your shell and not even answer. You don't back away any more; you're a lot surer of yourself than you used to be."
"Am I?" Jennifer thought about it. "Well, maybe I am. I'm older now, after all. I was just a student when I took my first trading run." She laughed, mostly at herself. "All I wanted to do was get something out of the ordinary on my vita. I did that, all right. I've been to places most Middle English professors would run screaming from. Come to think of it, I wouldn't blame them. If I thought it would do any good, I'd run screaming out of here."
"It wouldn't do any good. But Odern is lively, next to Gilver. Here at least you have a whole planet full of people doing all the normal things people do. There are only two kinds of people—well, Foitani, but you know what I mean—on Gilver. They have soldiers, to guard something nobody else is supposed to know about, and they have scholars, to try to understand something they don't dare approach. Aissur Aissur Rus is from Gilver—he was the head of the research team there."
"I like him better than a lot of the others," Jennifer said.
"Yes, he's sharp," Greenberg agreed. "He thinks for himself, and that's unusual among the Foitani. They usually just go around trying to figure out what the Great Ones would have done. I suppose that's one of the reasons he got the job. Nobody here had any idea what the Great Ones were doing with the Great Unknown, so they had to get someone who could put his own slant on things. But that's not the point I was trying to make. Aissur Aissur Rus was so glad to get away from Gilver that he volunteered to be part of the team that brought you back here."
"That's great," Jennifer said. "But he's going back there with us, isn't he?"
"So he is, but I don't think it's because he really wants to. The Foitani run more toward a strong sense of duty than we do."
"After what they put themselves through with the Suicide Wars, it sounds like a survival characteristic for them. To pull themselves back up after something like that, they'd have to have been able to stick together."
"I suppose so." Greenberg yawned. "We'd better get some sleep. If your research is done, we'll probably be leaving for Gilver early tomorrow, or maybe even late tonight. The Foitani don't believe in wasting time. They could be in here any minute now, to install the course tape and the electronic countermeasures they hope will get us there without being blasted by something left over from the Suicide Wars."
"Of course, they have their own bomb aboard already," Jennifer said.
"There is that, yes. But we don't have to worry about it as long as we're good little boys and girls." Greenberg's voice was dry.
"That's great," Jennifer said again. She walked into the refresher cubicle. When she came out, Greenberg went in. She undressed, lay down on the foam pad—it never had gotten moved to the storeroom—and pulled the blanket up over her. She closed her eyes, but discovered that, though she was tired, she wasn't ready to sleep. The faint ammoniacal smell of the foam pad reminded her of the one she'd had on the Foitani ship, which in turn made her feel all over again how very much alone she was. But for Greenberg, she was the only human for too many hundred light-years. The Harold Meeker's temperature was perfectly comfortable. She shivered under the blanket even so.
Greenberg came out of the refresher. He yawned again, stepping toward his sofa bed. If he had any worries like Jennifer's, he didn't show them. She suspected they were there; back aboard the Flying Festoon, he'd been good at keeping things to himself so his worries wouldn't worry others. It was one of the several traits for which she admired him.
She nodded to herself. "Bernard," she called softly, "do you really feel like sleeping right away?"
He stopped in midstride. His voice was controlled and careful when he answered, "Does that mean what I think it means?"
She nodded again, this time for him. "I think it means what you think it means."
"Jennifer, any man who didn't want to go to bed with you the minute he set eyes on you would need his vision correction adjusted. You know that," Greenberg said. Jennifer did know it. The knowledge had not always brought happiness; men found it too easy to separate her body from her, to want the one without caring about the other. But Greenberg was going on: "We have enough other things to worry about right now, so I want to know if you're sure. If it's going to complicate our lives a lot, it's more trouble than it's worth."
"If you have the sense to say something like that—and I was sure you did—then we should be able to manage, don't you think?"
"I hope so," he answered. He pulled off his shorts. The cabin of the Harold Meeker was small; two quick steps brought him to the foam pad. He got down beside her. She wadded up the blanket, threw it against the wall. He smiled. "I forgot just how lovely you are. I'd sort of kept from looking at you a lot—I didn't want to make a nuisance of myself, or more of a nuisance than I've already been for getting you dragged to Odern in the first place."
"That's foolish," Jennifer said. "It's not as if we haven't seen each other before. Trading ships are like that. And we're friends already, and more than friends, even if it was a while ago now."
"Quite a while ago now—getting close to ten years, isn't it? I didn't want to impose, and you were still upset about being here. But—" He didn't go on, at least not with words.
Jennifer savored what he was doing. She remembered from the Flying Festoon that he was seldom in a hurry—a rare virtue in men, she'd since found. Since he was about twenty years older than she was, she wondered if it was just that he was more thoroughly mature. More likely, it was that he was simply himself. Whatever it was, she enjoyed it.
Some considerable while later, she arched her hips so he could slide down her underpants. "Be careful with them," she said. "I only have the two pairs, and yours aren't made for the way I'm put together."
"I like the way you're put together."
"I noticed." Her hand closed on him.
"And I'll be careful," he promised. "How's that—and that—and that?"
Her underpants had only gotten as far as her knees, but she didn't care. "Mmm. That's—nice. Oh, yes. Right there, right there—"
The communicator buzzed harshly. "Oh, no," Jennifer said. Greenberg was a good deal more eloquent than that. The communicator ignored both of them. It kept on buzzing.
"Open your ship at once, humans. This is Pawasar Pawasar Ras speaking. I shall brook no delay." The electronic translator's tone was flat, but the words could hardly have been more peremptory. Pawasar Pawasar Ras went on, "We need to install important gear aboard the Harold Meeker immediately. Refusal to open the ship will be taken as evidence of conspiracy against the Foitani species."
"What do you suppose they do to conspirators against the Foitani species?" Jennifer asked.
Greenberg stroked her one last time. "I'm tempted to find out." But the moment was broken, and they both knew it. He got up from the foam pad and called out, "We will open the ship in a moment, Pawasar Pawasar Ras. You roused us from our rest, that's all."
"What rest?" Jennifer said. Then she giggled. "I was certainly roused, though."
"Shut up," Greenberg said over his shoulder as he dressed. She put her clothes back on, too. He ordered the air lock open. The alien, faintly spicy smells of Odern's air filled the cabin.
Two Foitani technicians came in. They filled the cabin, too, to overflowing. They installed their gadgetry, then ran some checks to make sure their artificial-intelligence system meshed with the Harold Meeker's computers. One of them wore a translator. He said, "If you try to disable this system, you will also disable your own electronics. If by some accident you do not do that, you will remain altogether vulnerable to weaponry from the days of the Suicide Wars. I tell you this for information's sake. You may die if you like, but you should be aware of how and why this will come to pass."
"Thank you for being generous enough to warn us," Greenberg said.
"You are welcome." Like most Foitani, the technician was irony-proof. "You will lift off as soon as is practicable, which is to say, at once."
Greenberg drew himself to attention and spoke to the air: "Commence lift-off sequence."
"Automatic checklist commencing," the ship's computer answered.
"Wait for us to leave this cramped vessel, you fool," the Foitani technician exclaimed. "We are not ordered to fly to Gilver." For once, Jennifer saw an agitated Foitan.
"Sorry. Computer, cancel lift-off sequence," Greenberg ordered. He turned back to the technician. "You did tell me to lift off at once, did you not?"
"Yes, but—" The Foitan gave up. Along with his companion, he hastily departed from the Harold Meeker.
Greenberg grinned at Jennifer. "The best way to confuse them is to take them perfectly literally when they don't want you to. Only trouble is, they're so literal-minded themselves that you don't get as many chances as you'd like." The grin changed shape, just a little. "Which is true of other things as well. Where were we when we got so rudely interrupted?"
Jennifer stepped close to him, took his hand, and guided it. "I think," she whispered, "you were right about here."
The trip from Odern to Gilver was about as long as the one from Saugus to Odern had been. Other than that, the two journeys held no similarity. This time, Jennifer had pleasant human company aboard a human ship. All the facilities were designed for her species; she'd been glad to discover that the Harold Meeker's sanitary supplies did include tampons.
She studied the material Dargnil Dargnil Lin had taken from Odern's library. The Foitani of Odern did very much seem to be spiritual descendants of their long-destroyed imperial ancestors: they were stern, humorless, efficient, and basically unwilling to recognize other species as anything but creatures to be exploited. I can testify to that, she thought.
Nothing in the data gave her any great insight into the Great Unknown. If the Foitani thought she'd step off the Harold Meeker with the answer to their problem all wrapped up with a bow around it, they were going to be disappointed. She took malicious glee at the idea of disappointing them, glee tempered only by the realization that disappointed Foitani were also liable to be dangerous Foitani.
The idea of stepping off the Harold Meeker without the answer made something else occur to her. "What became of the Flying Festoon, Bernard?" she asked. "Why aren't you still flying it?"
"I sold it after that first trip you took with me," he said, shrugging. "Marya and Pavel both reached master status after that run, and they wanted commands of their own. I could have kept it and hired on some less experienced crewfolk, I suppose, but I didn't feel like it. So I sold it and got this smaller ship. I'm a jack-of-all-trades and I like my own company pretty well, so I thought I'd make a few runs by myself. I was turning a profit till this mess with the Foitani blew up. If we can figure out the Great Unknown, I'll make one yet. So will you."
Jennifer sighed. She'd been a trader long enough that turning a profit was important to her, too. She wondered if it was important enough to mean she had to satisfy the Foitani after all. Maybe it was. If they kept their bargain and let her take her pay in trade goods, she was more confident than ever that she could squeeze them till their black, ball-bearing eyes popped.
But she was not just a trader; and she didn't want to be a full-time trader. She spent a lot of time with her reader in front of her face, going through Middle English science fiction both to keep her grasp of the language sharp and to see if any of the science-fiction writers, with their elastic minds, had imagined a race analogous to the Foitani. That was a better hope than wading through the xenanthropology manuals: a glance there had told her what she already knew, that none of the other races with which humanity was acquainted resembled the blue-skinned aliens at all. Besides, Middle English was more fun to read than the manuals.
"Any luck?" Greenberg asked hopefully when she came up for air one day about halfway through the trip to Gilver.
She had to shake her head. "Nothing so far."
"Keep looking. I know how I used to sneer at you for reading that stuff, but the ideas you got from it really came in handy on L'Rau."
"I used ancient literature to help me on Athet, too: Sherlock Holmes it was that time, not properly science fiction at all. As somebody—Niven, I think it was—said back in the twentieth century, abstract knowledge never goes to waste."
Greenberg knew something about the twentieth century, but not enough. "Niven? I thought he was an actor, not one of your writers." The misunderstanding took several minutes to clear up. Finally Jennifer projected pictures of both men. "No, they're definitely not the same fellow," Greenberg admitted.
"There, you see?" she said. "They—" She stopped with a squawk, grabbing for the back of the sofa bed—the Harold Meeker was lurching under her feet as if caught on the ground during an earthquake. She felt the hair on her arms and at the back of her neck prickle up in alarm. Ships in hyperdrive had no business lurching. What was there to run into?
The viewscreen had been dark all through the journey; in hyperdrive, what was there to see? It was dark still, but dark in a different way, dark with the velvety blackness of space. A couple of stars gleamed, like tiny jewels set on the velvet.
Greenberg and Jennifer stared at each other. "Status report!" he snapped.
"Ship has returned to normal space," the computer answered. "Reason unknown."
They looked at each other again, this time fearfully. If they couldn't get back into hyperdrive, the way home was laser driver, light-sail, and frozen sleep. Inside human space, that was feasible; every human planet listened for rescue beacons and maintained rescue ships. Starting out from somewhere in the middle of the Foitani sphere, though, they could travel for ten thousand years before they ever got back to the edge of human space.
"Condition of hyperdrive engine?" Greenberg said urgently.
After a moment, the computer reported, "All systems appear to be performing satisfactorily. The hyperdrive, however, is not functional."
Greenberg made hair-tearing gestures. Jennifer stifled a nervous laugh—she wondered if he'd really pulled his hair before he went bald. Just then, what looked like a supernova blossomed in the viewscreen. Jennifer threw up her hands to protect her eyes. "Radiation!" the computer screeched. "Protective screens—" There was a pause of several seconds. "—holding."
The flat voice of a translator came from the comm speaker. "Foitani ship Horzefalus Kwef to human ship Harold Meeker. You may proceed in normal operation."
"First tell us what the hell just happened," Greenberg said. His own voice was shaky; Jennifer blamed him not at all.
"We have successfully destroyed a hyperdrive trap that dates from the days of the Great Ones. As soon as a ship is forcibly returned to normal space, a normal-space missile left behind in the area homes on it. That missile is now detonated. You may proceed."
For the third time in a couple of minutes, Jennifer and Greenberg stared at each other. She was not surprised that he found words first: "There's no way you can pull a ship straight out of hyperdrive like that!"
"On the contrary," the Foitan aboard Horzefalus Kwef answered, "there is a way. You have just seen it demonstrated. Our science has not succeeded in reconstructing what that way is. I gather from what I infer to be your surprise that human science has not either. But the Great Ones knew. I tell you once more, you may proceed. Failure to do so will be construed as lack of good faith."
"We're going, we're going," Greenberg said. He gave the computer the necessary orders. The Harold Meeker had no trouble returning to hyperdrive. Greenberg gaped at the blank black viewscreen and shook his head. He spoke to the computer again. "Save multiple copies of all data pertaining to this incident."
"It shall be done," the computer said.
Jennifer said, "Just knowing that a hyperdrive trap is possible is going to drive human engineers crazy for years. Nobody's ever even imagined such a thing. And you'll have the only tapes of one in action." The Harold Meeker was his ship; they were his tapes. Trading Guild regs spelled that out in words of one syllable; she was just a passenger here.
"We'll have," he corrected. "I wouldn't try to go all regulation on you. You wouldn't be in this mess if it weren't for me. And besides . . . those tapes have enough money in them for a lot more than two people."
"You don't have to do that," she said. "I didn't go into trading for the money. And all the same, I'm a long way from broke."
"You're also a long way from home, and that's my fault. Computer, log that any profits from tapes of the hyperdrive trap will be divided equally between journeyman trader Jennifer Logan and me."
"Logged," the computer said.
Jennifer saw that any further protest would be worse than useless. "Thank you, Bernard."
He brushed that aside. "Let's just see if we can get back to human space to turn the tapes into money. Right now, I have to say that's rather less than obvious."
Some people would not have been generous at all. That wouldn't have bothered Jennifer; the tapes belonged to Greenberg because he was shipmaster. Some people would have been generous and then expected something—probably a lot—in return. Very few people were like Bernard Greenberg, to be generous and then act as if nothing had happened. She thought that was wonderful, and knew he wouldn't want her to say so.
The rest of the trip to Gilver was uneventful. The only misfortune that took place was running out of human-style food and having to go over to Foitani rations. Jennifer crunched away at her kibbles with a singular lack of enthusiasm. "No, a plural lack of enthusiasm," she said a few meals later, "because there are lots of ways I don't like them."
Greenberg answered with a snort. Wordplay wasn't one of his virtues, or vices. People had been arguing about that since the days of Middle English, and longer. Puns were part of why Jennifer enjoyed Middle English science fiction in the original; Robinson, among others, was untranslatable into Spanglish because of them.
The hours followed each other, as hours have a way of doing. At last the computer announced that the Harold Meeker had reached Gilver's star system. The viewscreen went from blank blackness to velvety blackness; Gilver's sun blazed in the center of it. Gilver itself, a bright blue-green spark, shone in one corner. The computer swung the ship and boosted toward the planet on normal-space drive.
Alarms went off. "Missiles incoming!" the computer shouted. "Firing laser driver. Many hostile targets, converging on ship from many directions. Maneuvering to position laser driver. Firing . . . Maneuvering . . ."
"Human ship Harold Meeker to Horzefalus Kwef," Greenberg called urgently. "What the bloody hell is going on? I thought you people said Gilver was a dead world except for the Great stinking Unknown. Where are all these ancient missiles from the time of the Great Ones coming from?"
While he and Jennifer waited for an answer, the ship's weaponry blasted three missiles. But more bored in. Then those, too, began winking off the screen, some just vanishing, others exploding in spheres of radioactive fire. Jennifer found herself wondering about the Harold Meeker's shielding and wishing she were wearing something more protective than thin synthetic underwear and cotton coveralls cut down to fit her. A lead suit of mail might have been nice.
At last the Horzefalus Kwef deigned to reply. "Human ship, these missiles are not of Great One manufacture. We are under attack by elements of a fleet from the Foitani planet Rof Golan. These Foitani are vicious and treacherous by nature. They must somehow have stolen information that led them to Gilver. We shall endeavor to protect your feeble ship as well as—" The transmission cut off.
"Did they get hit?" Jennifer asked. She half hoped the answer would be yes. The Horzefalus Kwef might be protecting them from the Rof Golani ships, but if it was gone they could try to head back to human space. The Foitani electronics aboard gave them some chance of making it in one piece.
But after checking the telltales, Greenberg said, "No, they're still there. The other ships are jamming their radio traffic. There they go, down toward the surface of the planet. I think we'd better follow them."
Regretfully, Jennifer decided he was right. The screen and radar plot showed explosions and missiles all around the ship. The Harold Meeker was not built for war. The Rof Golani spacecraft plainly were; they had more acceleration and maneuverability than a peaceful ship would ever need. By the way it performed, Horzefalus Kwef seemed a match for them. Staying close to it seemed the best bet for survival.
Unintelligible words came from the speaker: a Foitani voice, but not one always calm and self-contained like those of the Foitani from Odern. This one screeched and cried and yelled. "What do you suppose he's saying?" Jennifer asked.
"Nothing we want to hear, and you can bet on that," Greenberg answered. He studied the radar plot. "There goes one of the bastards! And that wasn't a missile from Horzefalus Kwef, either. Our paranoid friends' ground installations have paid off after all."
"They certainly don't think much of other Foitani, do they?" Jennifer agreed. "And they do think this Great Unknown thing is worth protecting. They didn't want to get caught flat-footed if another Foitani world somehow found out about Gilver."
"Somebody has, all right," Greenberg said.
The viewscreen blazed white. Alarms yammered, then slowly quieted. "We cannot sustain another hit so close without serious damage," the computer warned. A moment later, it added, "Entering atmosphere."
Atmospheric fliers swarmed up from the base on Gilver. With the fight so close to the planet, they were of some use against spacecraft. Jennifer found herself cheering when one of the attacking ships blew up in a burst of supernova brilliance. She stopped all at once, surprised and a little angry at herself. "I never thought I'd be yelling for the miserable folk who kidnapped me," she said.
"When they're helping to save your one and only personal neck, that does give you a different perspective," Greenberg answered.
"So it does," she said, glad he understood and also impressed that he could preserve his wry slant on things when they might turn to radioactive incandescence in the next instant.
Horzefalus Kwef managed to get a signal through. "Human ship Harold Meeker, land between the two westernmost missile emplacements at our base. Dive below us now; we will provide additional cover for you."
Deceleration compensators whined softly to themselves as the computer guided the Harold Meeker toward the designated landing site. The base was on the night side of Gilver. Not too far away, a large circle of ground was illuminated bright as day; at its center, the white tower that was the heart of the Great Unknown stabbed outward toward the stars.
Jennifer caught her breath at the beauty of the scene. She knew then that the esthetic sense of Odern's Foitani was different from her own, and also, she was suddenly sure, from that of their ancient ancestors. None of the pictures in their data base had been taken at night.
"Landing," the computer announced. "Recommend you do not leave the ship at the present time. The risk of radiation exposure outside appears significant."
"Did you program it for understatement?" Jennifer asked. Greenberg chuckled softly and shook his head.
Having nothing else to do, they spent their first hour on Gilver making love. Just as they were hurrying toward the end, a missile made a ground hit close enough to shake the ship. Jennifer laughed softly.
"What is it?" Greenberg gasped above her.
"Stupid twentieth-century joke," she answered, clutching him to her. "Did the earth move for you, too?" Then, for a while that could never be long enough, all speech left her.
Afterward, as he was dressing, Greenberg said, "Now I know you were really meant to be a scholar and not a trader."
"Why, Bernard?"
"Because who but a born scholar would come up with thousand-year-old jokes at a time like that? And thousand-year-old stupid jokes—you were right."
"I told you as much aboard the Flying Festoon. You didn't believe me then; I guess that's why you upgraded me from apprentice to journeyman."
"Partly I didn't believe you, I suppose. But there was more to it than that. You showed me you were a good trader. You got done what needed doing. You didn't seem to do it the way anybody else would, but it works for you, and that's the only thing that counts in the long run."
"I was using ancient literature as my data base instead of traders' manuals. No wonder things I tried looked strange to you."
"That's not all of what I meant, either," he said. "Most traders—just about all traders—push hard at everything they do. Pushing is part of being a trader. You're not like that. You're more reserved, shy almost. You were shy then—less so now, I think. But you still got a lot of business done."
"It's how I am," Jennifer said.
"I like how you are." His eyes softened as he smiled at her.
The communicator had developed a way of spoiling tender moments, almost as if it were a baby that resented anyone else's getting attention. It did not break the pattern now. "Horzefalus Kwef to human ship Harold Meeker. We have beaten the Rof Golani pirates away. You may emerge and join our scientific team."
"Then again, we may not," Jennifer said, irked at getting interrupted yet again.
The communicator was silent only a moment. Then the Foitan on the other end said, "Our weapons are trained on you. You will emerge and join our scientific team."
This time, the look Greenberg shot Jennifer was reproachful. She felt suitably reproached; she'd known since her first contact with the species that the Foitani were humorless. Greenberg said, "Thank you, Horzefalus Kwef. Let us put on our suits, if you don't mind—the computer says it's 'hot' out there. Then we will emerge and join your scientific team." Sighing, he walked over to the air lock. Sighing even louder, Jennifer followed.