Without conscious thought, Jennifer pointed her stunner at the—no, it wasn't a statue—at the imperial Foitan and thumbed the firing button. Only later did she pause to wonder why she'd done anything so aggressively futile. If the Great One was a holovid projection or a robot simulacrum, the beam would do nothing whatever to it. Even if he was somehow alive, the most she could do was make him itch. All she knew was that she wanted a weapon, and the stunner was the best she had.
The Great One scratched vehemently, all over. "It's real," Greenberg said. He sounded as if he was accusing Jennifer.
"I'm glad you thought it couldn't be, too," she said. She put the stunner away. Enraging something with carnivore teeth and four times her weight didn't seem like a good idea.
The Foitan walked toward her. He didn't act outraged, just curious. He said something in his own language. The words didn't sound too different from the ones the Foitani from Odern used. The only trouble was that without a translator she couldn't understand any of them. She spread her hands, shook her head, and bared her teeth in a Foitani-style frown. "I wish I could wiggle my ears," she whispered to Greenberg.
A look of intense concentration came over him. His ears did wiggle, close to a centimeter to and fro. Jennifer stared at him. His smile was sheepish and proud at the same time. He said, "I haven't done that since I was a kid. I wasn't sure I still could."
Jennifer wasn't sure whether the ear wiggling did any good. The Great One stopped just in front of her and bent his knees so his eyes were on a level with hers. Those eyes were not quite the jet-black of the eyes of a Foitan from Odern; they were a deep, deep green-blue, an intensification of the shade of the Great One's skin and pelt. The color would have been stunning in human eyes. Here, it was simply alien.
"We come in peace," Jennifer said, knowing the alien would not understand. She also realized it was barely true; they'd blasted their way into the tower, and a good-sized battle was going on just outside the Great Unknown's radius of insanity. For that matter, more than a few armed Foitani from Rof Golan were inside the radius of doom, even if at the moment they were in no state to use their weapons.
Greenberg held his hands in front of him, palms out. Many races used that gesture to show they had peaceful intentions. Jennifer tried to remember if she'd seen it among the Foitani from Odern. She didn't think so. As far as she could tell, though, Foitani in general didn't have peaceful intentions all that often.
The Great One kept studying Greenberg and her. A visual examination didn't seem to satisfy the alien. The Great One sniffed at them, too, with as little regard for their modesty as a dog would have given them. Jennifer wished she hadn't spent the last several hours sweating and terrified after the Foitani from Rof Golan attacked the research base of their cousins from Odern.
Finally, to her relief, the Great One straightened up. He spoke a few words into the air. Holovid pictures of alien races appeared in front of him, one after another, as if in a video collage. Jennifer recognized a couple of species, but most were strange to her. Then the Foitan spoke again. The cavalcade of images stopped—with a pair of humans hanging in midair before the Great One.
"That's impossible," Jennifer whispered to Greenberg.
"Maybe not," he whispered back. "I've heard it claimed in traders' bars that the Foitani made it all the way to Earth. I never thought it was anything but a bar story, though."
The humans in the holovid display—a man and a woman—were a lot grimier than Jennifer had worried about being. They wore furs. The man carried a wooden spear with a stone point attached with sinews. The woman clutched a stone knife, or it might have been a scraper. They both looked scared to death.
The Great One examined them carefully as he had Jennifer and Greenberg. He even sniffed them in the same way, as if to confirm by another sense that they were of the same type. That puzzled Jennifer. Could a holovid come with a scent attachment? She supposed so, for a race with a sense of smell more sensitive than humanity's. On the other hand—
"Bernard," she whispered, "do you think those poor cave people could somehow still be alive in here?"
He started to shake his head, then stopped. "I don't know," he said slowly. "The Foitan sure seems to be. After that, all bets are off."
Jennifer wondered if the tower was some kind of Foitani museum—or zoo. At first, no doubt because she'd seen the two humans, the idea was horrifying. Then she remembered the notion she'd had the first time she came up to the tower, of countless aliens going in and never coming out. Imagining a museum or zoo was a lot more comfortable than thinking about—what was the Middle English expression? A Final Solution, that was it.
The Foitan spoke to the air again. The humans it had called up disappeared once more, whether back into data storage or storage of a more literal sort. The Great One gave Jennifer and Greenberg another once-over. He bared his teeth at them in a Foitani frown. "Wondering what we're doing here," Greenberg guessed.
"I'll bet you're right," Jennifer said. "Earth is a long, long way from Gilver. What are the odds of cave people ending up here on their own and on the loose?" Something else occurred to her. "I wonder if the Foitan knows he's been here twenty-eight thousand years."
Greenberg hissed. "That's a real good question. I wish I had a real good answer."
"I wish I did, too."
The Foitan came out of his study. He walked over to the far wall of the chamber and rapped on it. This time it wasn't a door that opened, only a drawer-sized space. The Great One reached in, pulled something out, pointed it at Jennifer and Greenberg. By the way he handled it, the object was obviously a weapon.
"Oh, shit," Greenberg said softly. "Whether it's twenty-eight thousand years or day before yesterday, the breed doesn't seem to have changed much some ways, does it? Oh, shit," he repeated.
Jennifer would have looked for better last words than that. But the Great One seemed to have second thoughts. Instead of firing, he gestured with the weapon. "I'm tired of being ordered around by Foitani," Jennifer said. With very little choice, however, she went down the hall in the direction the Great One indicated.
After about twenty meters, the Foitan stopped her and Greenberg. Another rap on the wall produced another doorway. The Great One ordered the humans into the new chamber. It reminded Jennifer of nothing so much as the library setup back on Odern: it was full of strange-looking holovid gear and computer equipment. Greenberg found another name for it. "Command post," he said.
His proved the better guess. The Great One said something. A bank of screens came to life: the view immediately around the tower at ground level. More than one screen showed gray-blue Foitani from Rof Golan pressed up against the side of the building. Some still carried the arms they had brought to Gilver to use against the Foitani from Odern. All of them, armed or not, had the lost-soul look of Foitani under the influence of the Great Unknown.
The Great One had seemed almost godlike in competence and confidence. Now for the first time Jennifer saw him discomfited. He stared at his Rof Golani umpty-greatgrandscions as if he could not believe, did not want to believe, his eyes. She wondered what the Great One thought of those distorted versions of himself, versions made all the more grotesque by their obvious insanity.
At a shouted command, the Great One shifted to a view that had to have come from the top of the tower. Far off in the distance, Jennifer saw the spaceport by the research base of the Foitani from Odern. She also saw atmospheric fliers, tiny specks in the screen, diving to attack the base.
One exploded in midair. The burst of light drew the Great One's notice. The magnification of the pickup increased. Now small-arms flashes were plainly visible. Jennifer tried to figure out what was going on. The Foitani from Odern—her Foitani—seemed to have established a defensive perimeter against their distant cousins from Rof Golan. As she watched, a missile streaked out from the base to blow up a Rof Golani armored vehicle.
The Great One watched, too—in horror, if Jennifer was any judge. When the Foitan spoke again, alarms started yammering. Alarm ran through Jennifer, as well. Not so long ago, she'd scoffingly suggested to Pawasar Pawasar Ras that the tower might be full of armed Great Ones waiting to get loose. Now she didn't feel like scoffing any more.
Her own personal Great One didn't wait for any of his hypothetical relatives to arrive. Another wave of his weapon sent Jennifer and Greenberg back down the hall the way they had come. He marched them past the chamber in which they'd found him, all the way to the end of the corridor. An offhand, almost contemptuous rap on the wall produced the doorway Greenberg had found after so much effort. The Great One's weapon ordered the humans back into the room by way of which they'd entered the tower.
The Great One looked at the outer wall. Jennifer wondered if he saw it smooth and unblemished or if he could tell the hole from the shaped charge was there. Pieces of stone from the explosion still littered the floor. If the Great One saw that wall as being smooth and unblemished, he'd have the devil's own time figuring out how the broken rock got there.
Several other Great Ones came rushing into the room. They were as like the first one as so many peas in a pod—almost even down to color, Jennifer thought irrelevantly. They were all armed, too, with weapons identical to the one the first old-time Foitan carried. One of them pointed his weapon at the outer wall. Jennifer didn't see him pull a trigger or press a button, but suddenly the hole—or a hole—was visible to her again.
"Did he make a new opening, or is that the same one Enfram Enfram Marf's charge blasted?" she asked Greenberg.
"I think it's ours," he answered, his eyes wide. "What does that make the Foitan's gun, though? An illusion-piercer? An illusion-creator?"
"Whatever it is, I don't want to be on the wrong end of it. If it makes me think I'm dead, I have the bad feeling I'd really end up that way."
"Me, too." Greenberg reached out to take her hand. She squeezed back. The contact was reassuring. She knew—she thought she knew—it was real.
A Great One stuck his head through the hole. It was barely wide enough for his shoulders to go through, but he managed to squeeze out. Jennifer wished Pawasar Pawasar Ras hadn't listened to her or to Aissur Aissur Rus. Here were the warriors of a long-forgotten day, free on Gilver once more.
One of the Great Ones pointed his weapon at Jennifer and Greenberg. He urged them toward the hole they'd made. They went. Greenberg scrambled out first. Jennifer came after him a moment later.
The Great One goosed her with his weapon to make her go faster. She squawked and almost fell as she popped out of the hole. Greenberg helped steady her, then moved her away from the opening before the next Foitan came through and stepped on her.
Imperial Foitani kept emerging. Jennifer wondered if the alarm had rung all through the tower, and how many Great Ones had been in suspended animation or whatever they used. She thought again of Pawasar Pawasar Ras's worries and how she'd pooh-poohed them. If she ever got the chance, she'd apologize to the kin-group leader.
No Foitani from Rof Golan had been within a couple of hundred meters of where the Great Ones were coming out. The gray-blue soldiers, caught in the spell of the Great Unknown, gaped as their green-blue forebears came out of what might have looked to them like solid rock.
Jennifer waited for the Rof Golani to fell to their knees and worship the returned Great Ones, or to perform some equivalent ritual. The Rof Golani pointed at the newcomers, shouting among themselves. One of them yelled something toward the revived imperial Foitani. A Great One answered. Without hesitation, the Foitani from Rof Golan began running toward the Foitani who had come out of the tower.
And, without hesitation, the Great Ones methodically began shooting them down. Most of the Foitani from Rof Golan were too befuddled to use their own weapons, but their bared teeth, outstretched claws, and bellows of fury said what they thought of the Great Ones. But that wholehearted hatred availed them not at all, for the imperial Foitani calmly continued their massacre.
One Rof Golani somehow kept enough presence of mind to remember he carried a weapon more lethal than those with which he'd been born. Bullets ricocheted from the wall just above the Great Ones' heads. Jennifer and Greenberg threw themselves flat. A moment later, an imperial Foitan killed the only gray-blue soldier who'd seriously tried to fight back.
Slowly, Jennifer got to her feet. The precinct that contained the Great Unknown seemed to sway around her. Her view of the Foitani was rocking, too. Far from reverencing the Great Ones, the Foitani from Rof Golan had tried to kill them on sight. The Great Ones hadn't wasted any time returning the favor, either, and by all indications so far, they were a lot deadlier than the Rof Golani.
An old-time Foitan walked over to the nearest Rof Golani corpse and stared down at it. Jennifer wished she were better at reading Foitani facial expressions. Then the Foitan removed all doubt about what he was thinking. As Enfram Enfram Marf had with Jennifer, he drew back his leg for a kick. Unlike Enfram Enfram Marf, he didn't stop himself. He kicked the dead Rof Golani as hard as he could. The body had to weigh something close to two hundred kilos. The kick rolled it over, twice.
Several other Great Ones abused the bodies of the Foitani from Rof Golan. One picked up the weapon the Rof Golani had managed to fire. He examined it for more than a minute, then threw it aside with unmistakable scorn. His own hand weapon emitted a beam of some sort; but for being dead, the Rof Golani looked fine.
Off in the western distance, the explosions round the research base of the Foitani from Odern kept rumbling. Fliers clashed above it: Rof Golani attacking, Foitani from Odern defending. A Great One pointed his weapon at one of those fliers. It was more than a dozen kilometers away, but it twisted in midair and crashed to the ground with a flash of purple light.
The rest of the old-time Foitani began swatting fliers out of the air as easily as if they'd been flies. Jennifer watched in appalled perplexity as the machines tumbled. "What's going on?" she demanded of Bernard Greenberg, who had no more answers than she did. "The Foitani from Odern practically worshiped the ground the Great Ones used to live on. No matter what they said about the Rof Golani, they never said the Rof Golani hated the Great Ones, either. But they do." She looked at the sprawled corpses, shuddered, and looked away. "And the Great Ones hate them, too. Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing—this." She spread her hands in an all-encompassing gesture.
"Tell me about it," he said. He looked away from the carnage, too. "From what we've seen of the way Foitani treat other races, I'm glad they didn't just shoot us down without asking questions first."
One of the Great Ones swung his head around to glare at the two humans. By the way he hefted his weapon, he wasn't far from doing what Greenberg had feared. He wrapped a hand around his muzzle so it closed his mouth, pointed first at Jennifer, then at Greenberg. Shut up, she figured out, and obeyed. Greenberg didn't say anything more, either.
The old-time Foitani—by now a couple of dozen of them might have been outside the tower—spread out into what looked like a skirmish line. One of them pointed west, toward the sound of fighting . . . and toward the research base of the Foitani from Odern. The whole band started moving in that direction.
By the way they set out, fifteen kilometers was a stroll in the park for them. Jennifer looked longingly toward her sledge. The Foitan who'd warned her to be quiet gestured with his weapon—that way. She sighed and went that way after the Great Ones.
The old-time Foitani strode along at a pace that suited them fine, which meant it was uncomfortably quick for Jennifer. She kept up anyhow, and so did Greenberg. The Great One who was covering them looked as if he'd happily get rid of them if they slowed him down.
She looked around behind her, wondering if more imperial Foitani were issuing from the central tower. They were, but by ones and twos rather than by hundreds and thousands as she'd feared. They were quite bad enough by ones and twos.
By the time the leading Great Ones neared the edge of the radius of insanity, both their human captives were panting and footsore. Another few kilometers like that, Jennifer thought, and she'd look forward to being shot. Her coveralls were soaked with sweat; it ran stinging into her eyes and dripped from her chin.
Unlike the Foitani from Rof Golan, the Great Ones seemed immune to sweat. They tramped down the processionway as if on parade. Jennifer's uneasy vision of old-time Foitani leading defeated aliens in triumph came back to her. All that made this seem different from a small-scale version of it was that they were walking away from the tower, not toward it.
Even after the processionway ended, the imperial Foitani strode grandly along. A gnarled shrub grew by their line of march. Jennifer thought nothing of that at first. Then she realized it meant they were out of the precinct of the Great Unknown, for no plants lived within it.
Ahead, the firelight between the Rof Golani and the Foitani from Odern continued. Both sides had to be going crazy, wondering what had happened to their fliers. Jennifer thought the Great Ones were crazy too. She turned her head toward Greenberg and muttered, "Do they think they're bulletproof, or what?"
"I don't know," Greenberg muttered back, soft enough so as not to earn the wrath of their watchdog. "I know I'm not, though."
Just then, the communicator in his pocket spoke up in loud, clear, translated Spanglish. "Humans Bernard and Jennifer, this is Thegun Thegun Nug. You will tell me immediately who those strange Foitani with you are. You will also tell me whether they are in any way responsible for the difficulties our aircraft have encountered over the last few minutes."
That was Thegun Thegun Nug all the way, Jennifer thought: whatever he wanted, he ordered the humans to deliver immediately. He also had a gift for opening his mouth at just the wrong time.
The Great One who'd kept Jennifer and Greenberg from talking with each other snarled at them and held out his hand for the communicator. Greenberg gave it to him. He held it close to his face for a moment, as if figuring out how it worked. Then he spoke into it in sharp, abrupt tones.
Silence stretched. Jennifer wondered how a Foitani translator system that was geared to handling Spanglish would deal with suddenly getting its own tongue back. After a moment, she also wondered how close the language the Foitani from Odern used really was to the speech of the Great Ones.
Evidently it was close enough, for Thegun Thegun Nug seemed to understand it. The first part of his reply came back in Spanglish. "We greet you, Great Ones, returned to the world at last after so long. We shall serve you to the best of our ability and obey you in all regards, for we—"
The translator program suddenly went out of the circuit. Thegun Thegun Nug's own voice came over the communicator. Even speaking for themselves, Foitani from Odern seldom sounded excited. Thegun Thegun Nug was no exception. "If I witnessed the Second Coming, I think I'd show a little more feeling than that," Jennifer complained to Greenberg.
"The Foitani have been waiting ten times as long as Christians," he answered. "Maybe after twenty-eight thousand years, some of the rush has gone out of it."
"Maybe," Jennifer said. But her own reference to the Second Coming rang a bell in the scholarly part of her mind. What rough beasts were these old-time Foitani, slouching out of the Great Unknown to be reborn? She looked up to the sky, which still had no fliers in it. She shivered. The old-time Foitani might be very rough indeed.
Somewhere much too close, a Rof Golani hand weapon barked. Bullets shouted past. Jennifer went flat and tried to claw holes in the ground with her nails. She couldn't call this combat, because she had nothing with which to shoot back. But by now she knew what to do when somebody started shooting at her. So did Greenberg, who might have hit the dirt a split second before she did.
One of the Great Ones was down, too, down and shrieking. His blood was even redder than Jennifer's. His comrades cried out. A couple of them stooped beside him to give what help they could. It wasn't much. His screams went on and on.
The rest of the imperial Foitani did as Jennifer and Greenberg had—they dove to the ground. But they were armed, and armed with weapons more terrible than any mere firearms. With dreadful thoroughness, they turned those weapons on one possible spot of cover after another, as far as the eye could see.
A few more bullets came their way, but only a few. They stopped all at once. The silence that settled round the Great Ones was punctuated only by the cries of their wounded comrade.
Jennifer didn't yet dare to raise her head, but she did turn to face Bernard Greenberg. "Looks like it's going to be the old-time Foitani and the ones from Odern against the Rof Golani," she said.
"I'd say the Rof Golani are in big trouble," he answered. He lowered his voice. "I'd say we are, too. I don't mean just you and me, I mean everybody."
"I know what you mean," she answered as quietly. "I've already decided I'm going to tell Pawasar Pawasar Ras that I'm sorry." But she suspected that by then, Pawasar Pawasar Ras would be happy to see the Great Ones out and loose, not afraid of them any more. Thegun Thegun Nug had all but groveled to them on the communicator, at least in the brief part of that conversation that had been in Spanglish.
The wounded Great One's shrieks shrank to gurgles. He had an amazing amount of blood in his body; the spreading puddle was a couple of meters wide. One of the other imperial Foitani spoke to him. He gasped out an answer. The second Great One touched his weapon to the wounded one's head. The wounded one jerked and lay still.
"What are they doing?" Jennifer said, more than a little sickened. "He just killed him. The old-time Foitani have to have the medical technology to save him. Otherwise, they wouldn't still be here after so long in cold sleep, if they use cold sleep. So why did he kill him instead of helping him or getting him back to the tower where he could be worked on properly?"
"Maybe he only stunned him," Greenberg said. "We don't know what all their weapons can do."
"That's true, we don't." Jennifer mentally kicked herself for jumping to a conclusion. Just because the Great Ones had done their level best to exterminate every Rof Golani Foitan within range of their weapons, that didn't have to mean they were as callous among themselves.
But everything she'd learned about the imperial Foitani argued that they might well be. Races with gentle, tender dispositions didn't make a habit—maybe even a sport—of genocide. They didn't fight Suicide Wars, either, for that matter. And the way the Great Ones tramped on and left behind the one who'd been shot argued that they had no further use for him. They were, as Jennifer had long since concluded, not nice people.
The communicator spoke up again. Jennifer caught Pawasar Pawasar Ras's name in the middle of a lot of unintelligible Foitani chatter. Her spirits rose slightly. Maybe the administrator's good sense would warn him not to trust the Great Ones too completely.
"Maybe," Greenberg said when she spoke that thought aloud; their keeper seemed more willing now to let the two humans talk. He didn't sound as if he believed it, though. He kept looking back toward where the one old-time Foitan had been shot. He obviously didn't believe the Foitan was just stunned any more either.
The sun set when the imperial Foitani were still a couple of kilometers from the research base. By the way they glared at the western horizon, they looked about ready to order it to come back up and keep lighting their way. Jennifer knew a moment's fear it might obey them, too.
But however great they were, the Great Ones had no Joshua among them. They did the next best thing: they surrounded themselves with glowing globes that filled their camp with a light about as bright as daylight.
"That's all very well if they don't have any enemies left out there," Greenberg observed, "but if they do, the only way I can think of to make themselves more conspicuous would be to paint 'shoot me' on their backs in big fluorescent letters."
In spite of everything that had happened through a long, exhausting, terrifying day, Jennifer found herself giggling. She dug out a plastic pouch of Foitani kibbles and crunched a handful between her teeth. "These things had better have all the nutrients humans need in them," she said, "because I've used up just about everything that used to be in me."
"You and me both." Greenberg pulled off his shoes and stared at his feet. "I keep waiting for them to swell up right before my eyes."
"Me, too," Jennifer said. She shed her shoes, too, and sighed in exquisite relief as she wiggled her toes. "I didn't come out here set up to hike." She swigged from her canteen. She would have killed for a cold glass of beer; warm, rather stale water was at the moment a more than adequate substitute.
Greenberg also ate some Foitani people chow. He washed it down with his own water. "Better—a little better," he said. "If they're going to the research base tomorrow, at least they won't walk our legs off, Jennifer . . . Jennifer?"
Jennifer didn't answer him. She hadn't heard him. She lay sprawled on her side in the dirt, fast asleep.
The old imperial Foitani must have eliminated or at least intimidated the Rof Golani on the ground, for Jennifer woke up the next morning. At first, she wasn't sure she liked the idea; she felt almost as bad as she had after Thegun Thegun Nug stunned her.
She grimly went through a stretching routine she hadn't used since she was in the field on her last trading run. By the time she started to sweat, some of the kinks in her legs and back began to come loose. The Great Ones watched her with impassive curiosity.
Greenberg also needed limbering up after a rugged day and a night on the ground. When he was done stretching, he looked around for a bush to go behind. But when he started to go behind it, one of the old-time Foitani growled and lifted his weapon. Greenberg sighed. "Sorry about this, but I can't wait any longer," he said to Jennifer as he turned his back on her. She heard him open his fly.
"Don't turn around," she warned him. "In coveralls, this is a lot more inconvenient for me than it is for you." As she unfastened herself and squatted, she thought again that this was a problem Middle English science-fiction writers had ignored, especially for women. She wished she could ignore it herself. She also wished she could ignore the Foitani. As they had while she was exercising, they studied her now.
Relieved—and also relieved of her dignity—she got to her feet. "It's all right now," she told Greenberg.
"All right," he said, and turned around. "Shall we have a lovely breakfast of dry dog food?"
"Since our other choice is leaves and whatever Gilver uses for bugs, I suppose we might as well."
They crunched for a while. Jennifer watched the Great Ones while they watched her. They might have been sleeping on featherbeds instead of hard dirt; not a single tuft of fur seemed out of place. Some of them wore belts with pouches. They took what looked like slabs of raw meat out of the pouches, shared them around, and devoured them.
After a cautious pull at his canteen—who could guess when he'd get a chance to refill it?—Greenberg said, "I meant what I told you yesterday, you know."
"What did you tell me yesterday?" she asked, a little testily—far, far too much had happened yesterday. When his face fell, she remembered all at once what he'd told her. She felt herself turn red. "I'm sorry, Bernard. I know you did."
"And so?" he said.
It was a good question. Over the years, a lot of men had said they loved her, a lot more than she wanted to hear it from. To many of them, it meant nothing more than that they wanted to go to bed with her. She was already going to bed with Bernard, and it had been her idea as much as his. She knew that said something. But living with Ali Bakhtiar, in the beginning, had been as much her idea as his, too.
She shook her head. "Bernard, right now I just don't know what to say to you. I think maybe the only thing I ought to say right now is that this isn't really the time or place to say much of anything. You know I'm fond of you—or if you don't, I've been doing something wrong." She smiled wryly. "But love? I'm not even sure what love is. Let's talk about it later, when we can think straight and feel something besides being scared out of our minds."
"Fair enough," he said, his voice unreadable.
They had no further chance to talk about it, anyhow. The imperial Foitani, with the gift for timing all Foitani races seemed to share, chose that moment to break camp and start for the research base of the Foitani from Odern. They still didn't want the humans talking while they marched. A warning growl made that quite clear.
The Great One who had Greenberg's communicator used it to call the base. Jennifer heard Pawasar Pawasar Ras's name. That was all she understood of the conversation. She wished for some of the tricks to enhance recall that science-fiction writers had invented: memory-RNA pills and who knew what else, all guaranteed to let somebody learn a language in twenty-four hours flat or your money back. Trouble was, nobody'd bothered with such things after effective translator programs came along. Trouble with that was, as she'd found more times among the Foitani than she cared to remember, take away the translator program and she was helpless without it.
Far off to the south, gunfire crackled. From several kilometers away, it sounded cheery rather than terrifying. The Great Ones grew alert when they heard it, but it wasn't close enough even for folk as aggressive as they to hose down the area with their hand weapons.
The breeze, a fickle thing, played with the marching Great Ones and wearily trudging humans, blowing sometimes from behind them but more often into their faces. The old-time Foitani ignored it; like their descendants from Odern, they were good at ignoring anything they didn't care for. Jennifer rubbed grit from her eyes as she tramped along. Stopping didn't seem like a good idea, not with that Foitan and his weapon right beside her.
She walked past a couple of emplacements the Foitani from Odern had built to protect the way to the Great Unknown. No one came out to greet the returning imperial Foitani. She looked down into one gun pit close by the side of the road. A blue Foitan lay inside, sprawled and dead.
"I hope Pawasar Pawasar Ras knows what he's doing, treating with the Great Ones," she whispered to Greenberg. She got another growl from the armed Great One for that, but no more, for it was the first thing she'd said since the day's journey began.
When the party of Great Ones came within a few hundred meters of the research base, Foitani from Odern emerged to meet them. Jennifer watched the old-time Foitani watching the blue successor race. She wondered what the Great Ones thought of them as compared to the insanely aggressive Foitani who'd developed on Rof Golan.
She still had trouble telling one Foitan from another, but thought she recognized Pawasar Pawasar Ras and Thegun Thegun Nug among the Foitani from Odern in the group that had come out of the base. All the Foitani from Odern bowed low and chanted at the Great Ones. Without the translator, Jennifer couldn't be sure, but she thought the chant was the same as the one her kidnappers had intoned when they bowed to the ancient ruins on Odern after they'd brought her there: here were the Great Ones, freed from earthgrip at last.
The gesture of submission seemed to have meaning to the imperial Foitani. They came out of the skirmish line in which they'd advanced and formed up into a single compact group. Once they were all together, they bowed, too, though not nearly so low as the Foitani from Odern had.
After that recognition ceremony, ancient and modern Foitani walked toward one another. The two groups were only a few meters apart when the breeze stopped blowing into Jennifer's face. She knew a moment's relief—no more grit in my eyes, she thought.
The Foitani from Odern had been moving forward with every sign of the reverence they gave to anything that pertained to the Great Ones. All at once, they stopped short. They bared their teeth. Pawasar Pawasar Ras—Jennifer was sure now it was the project leader—growled something deep in his throat.
Without any more preamble than that, the Foitani from Odern roared and charged at the Great Ones.
For an incredulous half a second, Jennifer gaped at the onrushing blue Foitani. Then Bernard Greenberg tackled her. A couple of Great Ones managed to get their weapons up before the Foitani from Odern crashed into them, but only a couple. Most had their deadly small arms torn or kicked from their hands before they could use them.
Even without weapons, the Great Ones were a match for the suddenly berserk Foitani from Odern. They smashed them to the ground with a savage skill for which battleball scouts would have paid millions. All Jennifer and Greenberg tried to do was roll out of the way of the battling behemoths.
A Great One who hadn't been disarmed slew a pair of Foitani from Odern. Then, all at once, he ceased to be. Jennifer closed her eyes against a terrible glare that had already struck and vanished—an antiship laser, fired now at a ground target. Another old-time Foitan sizzled into nonexistence. A voice from the research base, amplified to a volume that approximated divine wrath, bellowed a command.
The imperial Foitani seemed better at giving orders than taking them. Another Great One fired in the direction from which the laser had come. Jennifer didn't know whether he took it out. Another laser, from a different position, cut him down. That bolt flew much too close to her. She felt a blast of heat and smelled ozone as if lightning had struck nearby. Only a few meters away, sandy ground bubbled into glass.
The amplified voice roared again, louder than ever. This time, the Great Ones, those few left on their feet, spread their arms wide. The ones with weapons dropped them. Only a couple of Foitani from Odern were in any shape to keep fighting. Regardless of whether their foes had quit, they started to attack again. The voice from the base cried out once more, this time with different words. Reluctantly, the Foitani from Odern held back. One—Jennifer thought it was Pawasar Pawasar Ras—shouted what was plainly a protest. The voice from inside the base shouted him down.
More Foitani from Odern emerged. All of this group were heavily armed, with rifles similar to the ones the Rof Golani carried. An armored fighting vehicle also came forth from some concealed entrance and clanked toward the Great Ones. It carried a fat laser tube and a cannon whose muzzle seemed to Jennifer's frightened eyes to be about as wide as her head.
The armed modern Foitani advanced on the imperials who had come out of the Great Unknown. They were more than cautious but less than the bloodthirsty maniacs into which Pawasar Pawasar Ras's party had turned. Greenberg noticed that at once. "How come they don't want to tear the Great Ones limb from limb?" he said.
"The breeze is blowing from the base to us again," Jennifer answered. "Maybe they can't smell them any more."
"Maybe the Great Ones haven't had a bath in the last twenty-eight thousand years," he said.
Jennifer made a face at him. Taking advantage of the fact that nobody was going to point a gun at her for talking, she said, "Maybe they—"
The voice from the base boomed forth once more, this time in Spanglish. "Humans Bernard and Jennifer, this is Aissur Aissur Rus. I suggest you come into the base through the passage from which our soldiers have just debouched. They are ordered to let you pass through them. We would not want you to come to harm through staying too close to the kwopillot from the Great Unknown."
"The who?" Jennifer said at the same time as Greenberg said, "The what?" The translator program had missed a word. Maybe it didn't have a Spanglish equivalent, even an approximate one. That happened now and again with translator programs. Trouble was, when it did, the word that refused to translate was almost always vitally important.
Aissur Aissur Rus didn't answer either Greenberg or Jennifer. Neither of them felt like asking again—whatever kwopillot were, he'd made it clear it wasn't safe to be anywhere around them. The behavior of Pawasar Pawasar Ras had done a pretty good job of that, too. Both humans hurried to pass through the ranks of the Foitani from Odern. The big, blue aliens ignored them, keeping eyes, attention, and weapons on the Great Ones.
The fickle breeze shifted again just as Jennifer was about to go down into the underground research base. Behind her, the Foitani from Odern bellowed in rage. A rifle began to bark, then another and another. Aissur Aissur Rus was screaming for the soldiers to stop shooting, but they wouldn't stop. The Great Ones went down like ninepins. When they were all dead, the soldiers rushed forward to kick and beat at their shattered bodies.
Sickened, Jennifer turned away. The kibbles she'd eaten sat like a ball of lead in her stomach. She hoped they'd stay down. "Back inside the radius of doom, the old-time Foitani treated the ones from Rof Golan the same way," Greenberg said.
"I know," Jennifer said. That had been only yesterday. She shook her head in disbelief. "I didn't like that, either."
"Neither did I. Let's get away from the Foitani with guns before they decide we might make good targets, too."
She let Greenberg take her by the elbow and lead her down the passageway. As soon as they were at the bottom, Aissur Aissur Rus spoke to them in Spanglish once more. "Come immediately to the command center. The ceiling light will direct you."
Following the moving light like a will-o'-the-wisp, they soon came to the screen-filled chamber from which Aissur Aissur Rus had spoken. He said, "I congratulate you on penetrating the tower at the center of the Great Unknown, humans. But had I known it was filled with kwopillot, I would have agreed with Pawasar Pawasar Ras that it remain sealed forever. I thought them merely the stuff of legend and modern depravity. Would I had been right."
"What are kwopillot?" Jennifer demanded. Bernard Greenberg opened his mouth, then closed it again. He'd evidently been about to ask the same question.
But before Aissur Aissur Rus could answer, Pawasar Pawasar Ras and Thegun Thegun Nug limped into the chamber. They were dirty and bloody and looked more like beasts of prey than intelligent beings. "Kwopillot!" Pawasar Pawasar Ras exclaimed. Had she not thought he'd tear her limb from limb, Jennifer would have kicked him.
Thegun Thegun Nug said something. Aissur Aissur Rus's translator turned it into Spanglish. "Filthy, reeking perverts! If the Suicide Wars were fought against them, suppressing them was worth the price."
"Aye, so it was," Pawasar Pawasar Ras declared. Aissur Aissur Rus didn't say anything, but he didn't look as if he disagreed, either.
"What are kwopillot?" Greenberg got the question out this time.
Word by word, the translator turned it into the Foitani language. That seemed to remind Aissur Aissur Rus and his colleagues that the humans were there. His answer, though, was less than helpful. "Never mind, human Bernard. They are practically extinct, and it is as well."
"No, they aren't," Greenberg said loudly. "Whatever they are, you may have murdered as many of them as came out of the tower in the middle of the Great Unknown, but how many do you think are still left in there? It's a big tower, you know, and it's awake or active or whatever you want to call it, thanks to us. What do you want to bet that more kwopillot will pop out of it soon?"
Aissur Aissur Rus, Pawasar Pawasar Ras, and Thegun Thegun Nug all bared their teeth at him. Thegun Thegun Nug growled something. Aissur Aissur Rus's translator turned it into, "What a terrible thing to say." Jennifer suspected the original had been rather more pungent.
Aissur Aissur Rus said, "Unfortunately, the human may well be right. We should make preparations on that assumption, at any rate. Those who came forth may have been kwopillot, but they were also Great Ones, with all the powers we have long believed the Great Ones held. If the kwopillot truly hold all the resources contained within the Great Unknown, how are we to resist them?"
"Better to ally with the Rof Golani than to risk such filth spreading through our sphere," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.
Maybe he had just been indulging in rhetoric, but Aissur Aissur Rus took him up on it. "An excellent suggestion, honored kin-group leader. Call them at once; we have already observed that they too know the proper response to this menace."
"As you say, Aissur Aissur Rus." Pawasar Pawasar Ras went over to a communications panel and started talking into it. Before long, the image of a gray-blue Foitan from Rof Golan appeared on the screen on front of him.
"What are kwopillot?" Jennifer asked. It was the third time the humans had tried that question, and they were still without an answer.
"They are disgusting," Thegun Thegun Nug said. "I go to wash their reek from my fur." He stalked off.
Jennifer turned to Aissur Aissur Rus. "Will you please explain what's going on, and why you've all started killing each other on sight?"
Aissur Aissur Rus made a noise that might have come straight from a wolf's throat. The translator rendered it with a sigh. Jennifer had some qualms about the translation; nothing that sounded so . . . carnivorous . . . had any business being merely a sigh. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "This subject is not easy for us to discuss, human Jennifer. It is also one we never thought could arise—as the Great Ones were believed to be extinct, surely the degenerate kwopillot had to be gone. Sadly, this now appears not to be the case."
"So what are kwopillot, and why do you keep calling them such nasty names?"
"Wait a minute," Bernard Greenberg put in, his eyes lighting up. "This has to do with sex, doesn't it? Otherwise you wouldn't mind so much talking about it."
"You are, as usual, astute, human Bernard," Aissur Aissur Rus said with another of those bloodthirsty-sounding sighs. "Indeed, the matter of the kwopillot does turn on sex, or more precisely on gender."
He paused, plainly not eager to go on without being prodded further. Jennifer looked at Greenberg in open-mouthed admiration. His shot in the dark had struck home—had it ever! If the Foitani were anything like most other species, they'd find sex worth fighting about no matter how technologically advanced they were. All at once, the Suicide Wars had a rationale that made some kind of sense.
Aissur Aissur Rus still stood silent. He looked big and blue and unhappy. Jennifer said, "May I ask, solely for the purpose of remedying my own ignorance, and with no desire to cause offense, what kwopillot do that other Foitani disapprove of?"
The variant of the trader's standard question paid off. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "You know that my race is unusual among intelligent species, in that we are born female and become male after our thirtieth year, more or less."
"You said so, once, yes," Jennifer agreed. "I didn't think much of it. We humans have found that intelligent races vary widely. Also—again I speak without intending to cause offense—Foitani are not sexually interesting to humans."
"The converse also holds, I assure you," Aissur Aissur Rus replied at once. He waggled his ears. "I thank you, human Jennifer. You have given me an idea so vile to contemplate that beside it the depravities of the kwopillot fade almost—not altogether, but almost—into insignificance."
Aissur Aissur Rus was the only Foitan Jennifer had ever suspected of owning a sense of humor. If he did, it was a nasty one, and he didn't bother with trying to speak inoffensively. She tried to match him irony for irony: "I'm glad I've given you something new and revolting to think about. Meanwhile, though, you'd started to explain what kwopillot were."
"I had not started yet," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "Indeed, I approach the task with considerable reluctance. You may perhaps have observed that we Foitani are somewhat reticent in discussing matters which pertain to the reproductive process. The Middle English term for such affectation of reticence, I believe, is Victorian, is it not?"
Jennifer stared at him. "That is exactly the word, Aissur Aissur Rus. I've thought it of your people myself. Now I have another reason for wishing you hadn't kidnapped me—I'd love to have seen the research paper you would have turned in. If you didn't outdo all the humans in my class, I'd be amazed."
"As may be," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "That, however, is at present irrelevant. Rather more to the point, one of the reasons we are as reticent as we are concerning reproductive matters is that they are relatively simple to disrupt among us."
"And kwopillot choose to disrupt them?" Greenberg pounced.
"Exactly so, human Bernard. For unnatural reasons of their own, they choose through hormonal intervention in the egg"—this was the first Jennifer had heard of Foitani coming from eggs—"to produce creatures . . . monsters might be a better word . . . male from birth. Even more outrageously, those born properly female, again by means of hormones, opt to retain their initial gender. That is what it is to be a kwopil—to be or to have been of the wrong gender for one's age."
"Why would anybody want to do that?" Jennifer asked, though she doubted she would get a rational answer. When it came to sex and gender, few intelligent races were rational.
Sure enough, Aissur Aissur Rus said, "Kwopillot act as they do because, being afflicted with perversity themselves, they wish to have others with whom to share it."
"Wait a minute," Greenberg said. "Suppose you have a male, uh, kwopil. What happens after he gets older than the age at which he was supposed to turn male anyway? Isn't he pretty much normal from then on?"
"No," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "For one thing, the hormone treatments which made him a kwopil leave their mark: he never smells as a proper Foitan should. For another, how could he be normal even were that not so, when he has spent all his previous life in a gender unnatural to that phase?"
"I see your point," Greenberg said slowly. So did Jennifer. No matter how refined the surgical techniques that changed them had become, transsexual humans were often pretty strange people. That might be an even greater problem for the Foitani, where the alteration was made before an individual ever saw the light of day, and where there was no natural equivalent of, say, a ten-year-old male.
She asked, "How do you know these things, Aissur Aissur Rus? Are there still kwopillot among you? You said they were extinct."
"Sadly, I overstated," Aissur Aissur Rus admitted. "Every starfaring Foitani world knows them, and many of those still sunk in planet-bound barbarism. The modification techniques, as I said, are far from difficult. Depraved and wealthy individuals, anxious only for their own degenerate gratification, generally create the first ones on a world. But once there are kwopillot on a world, they make more like themselves. In a way, it is understandable—who else but others of their kind would care to associate with them?"
Jennifer and Greenberg looked at each other. They both nodded. Humans made genetically engineered sex slaves every now and again, too. A year didn't go by without a holovid drama showing that kind of lurid story. Jennifer didn't know whether to be relieved or depressed that another race could act the same way.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras was talking to the gray-blue Rof Golani officer. He spoke too softly for Aissur Aissur Rus's translator to pick up what he was saying, but Jennifer heard one word she understood: kwopillot. When Pawasar Pawasar Ras said it, the Rof Golani Foitan's red eyes opened wide. So did his mouth, displaying his large, sharp teeth. The better to eat you, my dear, Jennifer thought. But where before the Rof Golani had wanted only to attack the Foitani from Odern, now this one listened attentively to everything Pawasar Pawasar Ras had to say.
"They both hate these kwopillot worse than they hate each other," Greenberg said.
Jennifer quoted the title of a Middle English novel: "The enemy of my enemy—"
Greenberg knew the saying from which it had come. "Is my friend. Yes." He turned to Aissur Aissur Rus. "Obviously the Great Ones knew of kwopillot, too. Did they feel the same way about them as you do?"
"There can be no doubt of it," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "Because we normally find it distasteful in the extreme to discuss such reproductive issues, the speculation is not published, but many, I think, privately believe the kwopillot problem to have been a possible cause of the Suicide Wars. I am one of those, and not the only one here at the base."
"What's the point of thinking if you don't publish?" Jennifer said. What she was thinking of was her fruitless search through the Foitani records on Odern. She'd never so much as heard the word kwopillot there, not even from Dargnil Dargnil Lin, who was supposed to be helping her learn about the Great Ones. She made a mental note to give him a good swift kick the next time she saw him.
Before Aissur Aissur Rus could answer her—if he was going to—Pawasar Pawasar Ras broke his connection with the Foitan from Rof Golan. When he turned and spoke directly to Aissur Aissur Rus, the latter's translator caught his words and turned them into Spanglish: "The barbarians have agreed to parley with us. Even they know the extent of the kwopillot menace."
"Excellent," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "All the resources we and they both can bring together will be important in eliminating revenge-minded kwopillot backed by the technological power of the Great Ones."
"You have stated my precise concern." Pawasar Pawasar Ras went on, "Humans Bernard and Jennifer, your presence will be required at this parley. You had the greatest and most significant contact with the denizens of the tower."
"May we go back to my ship first so we can rest and wash?" Greenberg asked.
"Rest and wash here," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "If further trouble erupts from the Great Unknown, this base is the most secure place on the planet. We would not want you to be lost before you have provided us with the information we need."
"What about afterward?" Jennifer said. Pawasar Pawasar Ras did not deign to reply, from which she drew her own dark conclusions. Reluctantly, though, she admitted to herself that the Foitan administrator had a point. She wished the Harold Meeker were an armed and armored dreadnought instead of a thoroughly ordinary trading ship.
By Foitani standards, the chamber to which Aissur Aissur Rus led her and Greenberg was luxuriously appointed, which is to say that it had its own plumbing fixtures and a foam pad twice as thick as the one she'd enjoyed—or rather, not enjoyed—on her journey from Saugus to Odern. Aissur Aissur Rus took the door with him when he left, but Jennifer was sure the room was bugged.
Sighing, she walked over to what the Foitani used for a toilet. "Turn your back," she told Greenberg. "I hate this miserable excuse for plumbing."
"I know what you mean," he answered. "Still, given the choice between this and what the Great Ones had us do earlier today, I'll take this."
"Not my idea of a pleasant choice," she answered.
A little later, they both got out of their clothes and washed in the lukewarm washbasin water that was the only water they had. Greenberg shook his head as he examined his tattered coverall. "I should have insisted on going back to the Harold Meeker, for fresh clothes if nothing else."
"Too late to worry about it now." Jennifer scrubbed and scrubbed until most of the dirt came off her hide. She looked down at herself. Even clean, she was several different colors, most of them unappetizing. "With all these scratches and bruises and scrapes, I look more like a road map than a human being."
"A relief map, maybe. The terrain is lovely," Greenberg said. Jennifer snorted, not quite comfortably; even foolish compliments made her uneasy. Greenberg went on, "What do you think we ought to do now?"
She chose to think he was talking about the situation generally rather than the two of them in particular. She was too tired to worry about the two of them in particular. "Given the chance, I'd just as soon sleep," she said. "If we're going to be talking to the Rof Golani, we shouldn't be punchy while we're at it."
If he'd had anything else in mind, he didn't show it. He got dressed and lay down on the pad. Jennifer joined him a moment later. No sooner was she horizontal than exhaustion bludgeoned her.
"Wake up, humans!" The flat Spanglish from the translator was loud and abrupt enough to make sure they did just that. Jennifer found she'd snuggled against Greenberg while she slept, whether for warmth, protection, or no particular reason she couldn't say. The voice from overhead went on, "The delegation from Rof Golan has arrived. Your immediate presence at the deliberations is necessary."
"Yes, Thegun Thegun Nug," Jennifer said around a yawn.
A brief pause, then. "How do you know to whom you speak? The translator eliminates the timbre of individual voices."
"It doesn't eliminate personalities," she answered; let the order-giving pest make of that what he would. Whatever he made of it, he said nothing more. She asked Greenberg, "How long were we out?"
"A couple of hours," he answered after a glance at his watch. "Better than nothing, less than enough."
"Enough of your chatter," Thegun Thegun Nug said. "As I told you, your presence is required immediately."
Jennifer was fed up enough with his arrogance to tell him to take a flying leap, but a door opened in the wall just then. Behind it stood a Foitan with one of their nasty stunners. He gestured imperiously. "Charming as always," she said to the ceiling as she stood up. Thegun Thegun Nug did not bother answering.
The Foitan gestured again: out. He stepped back to make sure Jennifer and Greenberg could not get behind him. They followed a glowing ceiling light. He followed them. After a while, he rapped on a hallway wall. When the rap produced a door, he pointed through it. The two humans went in. The door vanished behind them.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras, Aissur Aissur Rus, and several other Foitani from Odern stood against one wall of the room. A smaller number of blue-gray Foitani from Rof Golan stood against the opposite wall. No one carried any weapons. From the way the two groups kept empty space between them, Jennifer got the feeling they'd fight with bare hands if they got too close together.
The Rof Golani turned their red eyes on the humans. Pawasar Pawasar Ras spoke; his translator passed his words to Jennifer and Greenberg. "Warleader, these are the aliens of whom I spoke. Humans, know that you face the Rof Golani warleader Voskop W Wurd and his staff."
Voskop W Wurd took half a step forward to identify himself. He looked like a warleader, especially if the war was to be fought with claws and fangs. When he spoke, his words had the howling quality Jennifer had heard before from Rof Golani. Pawasar Pawasar Ras's translator abraded emotion from them. "You are the creatures who effected entry into the Great Unknown?"
"So we are," Greenberg said. "Your soldiers did their level best to kill us while we were in there, too."
Several Foitani from Rof Golan snarled as that was translated. Jennifer was glad they were unarmed. Voskop W Wurd spoke to Pawasar Pawasar Ras. "You are soft, blue one. You allow the vermin more license than even a person deserves."
Aissur Aissur Rus answered for his boss. "And because of it, Rof Golani, we have learned more than we would have with our usual straightforward approach to non-Foitani intelligences."
Voskop W Wurd's wordless snarl told what he thought of that. But in his own way he too was an officer and leader. "This is a parley, to seek information," he said, as if reminding himself. "Very well, creatures, inform me."
Having met Enfram Enfram Marf, Jennifer knew what the typical "straightforward" Foitani attitude toward other intelligent races was like. The Great Ones had shown it, too, so Voskop W Wurd's version was less irritating than it might have been otherwise. She merely wished him into me hottest fire-pit in hell before she began telling what had happened over the previous couple of days. She and Greenberg took turns with the story. They must have been interesting, for Voskop W Wurd eventually settled down and listened just as if they had been Foitani.
At one point, he asked, "What is the mechanism that creates a ring of insanity around the Great Unknown?"
"We do not know that," Pawasar Pawasar Ras answered. "We have been trying to learn for many years."
Again, a little later, "How is it that you creatures were able to enter the central tower and we True Folk not only failed but also failed to perceive the existence of an opening?"
"I don't know how that happened, either," Jennifer said. "The Foitani from Odern also couldn't see the opening; I do know that."
"It is so," Pawasar Pawasar Ras admitted. "Voskop W Wurd, when the humans went inside the central tower, our visual observations and the readings of our instruments reported that they were penetrating a wall which remained solid. Indeed, it did remain solid for your soldiers close by. The Great Ones seem to have mastered selective permeability of solid matter. How they did this, I cannot say."
"Selective is right," Greenberg said. "When we wanted to get out of the tower later on, the wall was solid for, or rather against, us, too."
"Tell me of the Great Ones," Voskop W Wurd said. As best they could, Jennifer and Greenberg did. When they finished, the Foitan from Rof Golan made a ripping-cloth noise the translator rendered as a thoughtful grunt. "To think they truly have survived, to think their knowledge is available for hunting down."
"I see two problems with that," Jennifer said.
"You are not a Foitan. Who cares what you see?" Voskop W Wurd said.
"If you don't, why are you asking me questions?" Jennifer asked. Voskop W Wurd's lips skinned back from his teeth. Jennifer ignored him and went on, "First, now that the Great Ones are awake again, they may be interested in hunting down what you know, too. And second, they're kwopillot, so how do you propose to deal with them?"
Voskop W Wurd turned to Pawasar Pawasar Ras. "There can be no doubt they are kwopillot?"
"None." Pawasar Pawasar Ras spoke to the air. "Bring in the evidence." A door opened in the wall opposite the one by which Jennifer and Greenberg stood. Two Foitani from Odern dragged in the torn corpse of a Great One. Pawasar Pawasar Ras addressed Voskop W Wurd, "Judge for yourself."
Voskop W Wurd's nostrils flared. The snarl he had given Jennifer was as nothing next to the one he unleashed now. The gray-blue Foitani from Rof Golan who were with him echoed the cry. He said, "Aye, that is the harshest kwopil reek I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. They were all thus?"
"Every one we encountered," Pawasar Pawasar Ras answered.
"Then every one needs to be tied down in the hot sun and disemboweled. That's how we keep the menace of kwopillot from spreading among us," Voskop W Wurd declared.
Jennifer gulped. She hoped the Foitani from Odern would denounce Voskop W Wurd for the bloodthirsty barbarian he was. But Aissur Aissur Rus said only, "We use lethal injections ourselves. Still, the principle remains the same."
Greenberg whispered, "I wonder what kwopillot do to ordinary Foitani when they're the ones in power."
"Nothing good, I'd bet," Jennifer whispered back.
"You Oderna are too soft with your aliens," Voskop W Wurd said to Pawasar Pawasar Ras. "There they go, plotting who knows what between themselves."
"Repeat yourselves, humans Jennifer and Bernard, loud enough for the translator to pick up your words," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.
Before Jennifer could repeat herself, a Foitani voice started shouting from a ceiling speaker. The translator brought her the gist of the announcement. "Honored kin-group leader, radar reports the central tower of the Great Unknown has lifted off from the surface of Gilver and is performing as a spacecraft. We have visual confirmation as well. Please advise."