Myra cried, “Jewel, are you going to mourn your life away?”
This annoyed me. “Do I sound like I’m mourning? I’m not grieving, I’m angry! I’m angry at your mother. I’m furious at Witt himself. I get wrathful when I’m reminded, so I try very hard not to think about it.”
“But you haven’t had any other liaison…”
“That’s true, but it’s not out of any feeling of…fidelity. When someone male makes a move in my direction, all I feel is vacant. It may be chemical or aberrational or perhaps obsessional, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Let it lie!”
Myra flushed. “All right. I understand. Will you do the favor anyhow, for me?”
I regarded her thoughtfully. “I’ll do what I can if you will return a favor, which is what I linked you about in the first place.”
“You have only to ask, you know that.”
None of the Dame’s actions had been Myra’s fault, so I forced the anger out of my face and voice. “The ESC on Moss has discovered a group of old Hargess ships up on the plateau area. It occurs to me the ships may have ended up there the same way the Derac did, through some kind of spatial anomaly. It also occurs to me that the people in those ships seem to have disappeared, maybe in the same way Witt and his group did. Tell Dame Cecelia about those ships. Suggest that she use her influence to get them investigated by ESC because they may contain a clue to Witt’s disappearance.”
Myra looked as astonished as I had expected. “What do you want to know about them?”
“What will the Hessings want to know? Everything there is, Myra. Where they were going, by what route, who was on them…everything. Send me the information through the ESC on Moss…”
“Mother doesn’t deserve your help, but…”
I held up a threatening hand. “I thought we had it clear! I’m not doing it for her. I’m doing it strictly between us. I try to find out what you want to know, you get ESC to stay on that planet and investigate those ships.”
On my way back through my urb, I was only half-conscious of my surroundings. Outside the express pod, towers sprinted by, cross-street traffic Dopplered above and below while the pod made its unvarying rhythm, purrs interrupted by clatter. Talking about Witt always raised his ghost, though he was a fragmentary wraith at best, shreds and shards that never added up to a whole person. I couldn’t dislodge a particular pattern of light and shadow falling across his cheekbone and eye, or the wide double curve of his mouth, like an ancient bow. His hair was deeply black and thick, an inheritance from an Asian grandmother, cowife of a far-traveled Hessing entrepreneur. I remembered his hands on me. He was a clumsy toucher, willing but not…empathetic. His hands never quite soothed, never quite rubbed out the ache, never quite scratched the itch. I remembered his smell, always waking with it still in my nostrils, not unpleasant, not at all remarkable.
That was it. The curl of an eyebrow and lip, an inept touch, a certain smell. If that was all I had left, where had the rest of it gone? Had there been any more than that? From time to time I had told myself we hadn’t known one another long enough to build a complete memory of one another. Either that or that last day with him had totally corrupted recollection. Perhaps during those eleven days of our liaison I’d been dreaming my way into his life, not really looking at him at all. That was possible. I did that a lot, had done that since a child. It was far easier to make a pleasurable world and its inhabitants inside my head than to deal with what was real.
What was increasingly real was this amorphous cloud of apprehension I couldn’t get rid of, this vague mental fog out of which some tiny voice whispered, “Danger here. Menace by something, someone. Peril coming.” It had nothing to do with the ordinary, day-to-day concern about IGI-HFO. It felt like those times when one wakens in the morning inhabited by shapeless and totally reasonless fear, leftovers from dream terror that one cannot possibly recall. That terror dissipates, however, and this did not. On the podways I saw only the everyday, the normal, the usual. A veiled woman hurrying to catch the pod, followed by her package-carrying, ivory-haired conc. Crowds moving through the pod lobbies. Veiled people trailing one or more package-carrying concs like comet tails. Groups of bored young people chattering in corners, a trio of concs near the entry, singing for pod change. It suddenly occurred to me that concs who were, so to speak, still “un-adopted” would need to eat! Did they live on pod-lobby food?
People moved in streams, tangling and untangling, up a level, down a level, into the pods, out of the pods, traffic as traffic had been for years. The singing concs swayed to their music, their treble voices insistently sweet, like holiday candies. One of them glanced across me, then back, its eyes fastening upon mine, eyes as opaque as darkness itself, limitless in depth, ageless in intent, regarding me from a distance that reduced me to ant size, a mere thinglet, a nonimportance.
As I dropped my eyes, I shivered, unable to help it. When I looked up again, the concs were wandering away, still singing softly, following their accompanist. The look it had given me had been one of total incomprehension, exactly what one might expect from a totally unrelated race of creatures, no more threatening or strange than the look one might get from a pet bird. Still, I had never seen that expression on a conc’s face before. Of course, I hadn’t spent any time looking at conc faces. Those who didn’t like them tried not to look at them, and that included me.
At the sanctuary, where I stopped to see Adam, there was a certain restlessness evident. During the night, the guard told me, several strangers had tried unsuccessfully to force an entry from the flit lobby. They had threatened to return in force. “All the smaller dogs are gone,” murmured the guard. “The lab is cleared out. The supplies have been divided up and shipped. They took your idea and smuggled everything out through the cargo tunnels. All the trainers are gone but Adam, Frank, and Clare.”
“Three trainers, six dogs, is nine berths on a starship,” Adam said, when I went to his suite. “Very expensive proposition. It’s not sensible, but then, nothing makes sense anymore!”
“Of course nothing makes sense,” I snapped. “Living creatures aren’t supposed to live without breathing space.”
He snorted. “Iggy-huffo says we’ll all love one another once all the dogs are gone.”
“Don’t think about it, Adam, just do it. You three, the dogs, and all your supplies are leaving here by chartered cargo flit about midnight. You go straight to the ESC port. Paul and I will be joining the ship there at dawn tomorrow. How are the dogs?”
“Behemoth, Titan, and Wolf are a little nervous but otherwise perfectly splendid. Dapple, Vigilant, and Scramble likewise.” He nodded in satisfaction. “All three are pregnant. Scramble will pup first.”
“Scramble’s the best one of all,” I commented, fondly.
“She’s certainly smarter than any two of the others put together.” He sounded vaguely miffed at this. Adam preferred Behemoth to the others. At the time, I didn’t know why.
One more thing had to be done before I left, letting Gainor Brandt know about my conversation with Myra, for he had impressed on me that ESC needed to know anything and everything, no matter how trivial, about the races they had to work with.
I linked him. He sounded tired and depressed. He was on his way to a meeting, but he could stop later in the evening to have a drink with me on my mercantile floor. I agreed and went home to join Paul for dinner. Since Paul was still full of talk about Moss, I was able to work the Derac into the conversation by asking, offhandedly, “Why did the Derac sell the moon?”
“The Derac always sell off a part of new discoveries, to pay back their Gathering of Elders, the G’tach, which subsidizes exploration.”
“So, why don’t they handle the compliance process themselves? Why contract it to ESC?”
He assumed his lecturing posture, head back, eyes half-shut, unshakably superior. “While you were still down in Baja, say…eleven years ago, the Alliance got around to formalizing the Deracan lexicon, and I was assig
ned as one of the assistants to the team who worked on it. I may have spoken of it to you.”
“I recall your saying it was a miserable job.”
His nostrils narrowed, signifying displeasure. “Everything with the Derac is a stinking battle, stinking in a quite literal sense! They ‘cooperated’ in providing the lexicon only because accurate translation is needed for them to trade with other races. They tried to keep us focused only on the vocabulary of quantities and merchandise. What and how many for how much. It was like deciphering a wall by being given every seventh brick. Humans can’t speak Deracan because we don’t have the throat sack they do. It’s difficult for us even to distinguish individual words.
“Lingui-putes, however, have no such limitations. All they need is word meanings, so the four of us went to a Derac retirement planet with a dozen lingui-putes to spend some time with a few unwilling Derac. In practice what happened was the Derac pointed at his lunch, wrote a certain symbol, and made a particular noise, which our machines recorded as a sound pattern. We labeled that symbol and its equivalent sound pattern Gak—or something equally arbitrary—and when we talked about that sign or sound we said, the ‘Gak sound’ or the ‘Gak symbol.’
“We guessed that it probably referred to food, but we didn’t name the symbol food, because we might be wrong. It might mean something I killed, or ugly animal or even, that’s you if I catch you alone somewhere. So, when we fed it to the lingui-pute, we directed the ’pute to look for Gak or its parts in other samples of the language, hoping the context would carry us into areas that would help specify the meaning.”
I rubbed my forehead, just above my eyes. Paul’s discourse often seemed to set a headache off. “What does this have to do with why the Derac don’t do their own surveys?”
“I’m getting there,” he said reprovingly. “My work on the lexicon is pertinent. We began to accumulate a lot of fighting words. Attack, take over, grab, steal. They had twenty expressions for thievery, over a hundred for robbery and assault. Essentially, they’re pirates and adventurers who travel in Daj-Derachek—(that’s our word for their word, you understand?) It means shipclan, a group that includes the males descended from one patriarch who occupy and run one ship, together with their whelps, or apprentices.
“When they discover something worth selling, three large shares go to the elders, the G’tach; to the members of the shipclan; and to the ship itself, for maintenance. Two smaller shares are given also: one to the parent ship, the one they were born to, and one to a fund for the new ship they will buy for their whelps.
“Every Derac carries a togro, a genealogy that goes all the way back to one of the seventeen racial patriarchs, and the name of that patriarch is the first part of each Derac’s name, even if there are a hundred generations in between. As there were only seventeen patriarchs, there are only seventeen G’tach…”
From the center of my raging headache, I interrupted him. “The point you are reluctantly approaching, in answer to the question I asked an extremely long time ago, is that since whelps grow up in shipclan and are limited to shipclan, no Derac ever specializes in anything.”
“That’s right,” he said, flushing slightly. “No surveyors, no biologists or zoologists.”
I rubbed my forehead, interested despite the dagger stabbing my brain. “No physicians? No…designers or accountants? No cooks?”
“Derac cuisine consists of burning the fur, scales, or feathers off whatever they’ve killed, then eating it raw. Clothing is the untanned hide of whatever they’ve recently eaten, the smellier the better. Their word for famine is the same as their word for odorless, because when there’s famine, they eat their clothing and don’t smell anymore. They don’t need accountants because every one of them can calculate in his head faster than you can feed data into a computer, including complex navigational computations and anything to do with money. You want to know how much your savings would be with variable interest compounded for a millennium, ask a Derac.”
He shook his head, making a face. “Nobody I know has ever seen a sick Derac, so physicians aren’t needed. They may well eat anyone who’s sick or wounded. They farm out all specialized work. Your average Derac shipclansman—that is, the younger members of the race—are willing to spend about five minutes on any nonship problem. If they can’t solve it in five, they farm it out. Derac start to fidget if they have to stay two days in one place. They have no infrastructure to support science, engineering, procurement, or training. They have no history of it, and it would take generations to create one, just as it took us. They became starfarers by the back door, by buying ships. They don’t build anything for themselves.”
I stood up. “I presume no music, no art.”
“Along toward dusk, they did something they called singing. It was a kind of bellowing, actually. The elders spent a good deal of time sprawling about on warm rocks having what we would consider philosophical discussions, from what little we overheard. Why are we here? What are we for? What should we be doing? We weren’t invited to listen in, as the Derac are consistently aggressive, even in ordinary daily life. We concentrated on the job and left as soon as it was done, though done isn’t the right word. We’re still recording Derac speech everywhere we can, refining our own understanding of their talk and what they really mean when they talk.”
I had been about to leave, but this stopped me. “We, being who?”
“The Interstellar Coalition Linguistics Board. Earth builds a lot of Derac ships, so the devices can be built in. Don’t mention that to anyone, Jewel! It’s against the IC conventions, and it’s being done quietly, not only with the Derac, but with any race where understanding is questionable. The board feels it’s better to breach the conventions to improve communication than have a misunderstanding start a war.”
“As they all too frequently have!” I commented before excusing myself and leaving Paul to finish his supper while I went to my room and used a pain spray. If I was now at the point of getting a headache every time I was in Paul’s company for more than a few moments, the coming trip to Moss would not be a festival. I lay down to let the pain spray work, which it did, before donning the requisite robe and veil to keep my appointment with Gainor.
I met him by the lift, and took him into the nearest bistro, where we could sit uninterrupted for a time over a glass of a greenish brew suitably called Alga-alka. Though some people confessed a fondness for it, I couldn’t drink it. Most people ordered it only as an excuse for occupying a seat. We each took one ritual sip before I filled him in on my bargain with Myra Hessing.
“So, you’ll get all the pressure you need to keep ESC on the planet for a while,” I concluded, reluctantly taking another sip to wet my throat.
“Were you counting on her asking this favor?” he asked, turning his glass to watch chains of sluggish green bubbles ooze upward.
“Actually, I intended to ask her to do it as a favor. Her asking me for a favor came out of the blue. Anyhow, the thing I wanted you to know was this strange Derac thing, about buying human women. I got Paul to talking over supper, and from what he says about them, it’s obvious there’s no way I’d be able to find out anything about the Derac, even if there are some of them on Moss. He did offer one item of interest, however. Do we do any listening on Derac retirement planets?”
“What listening?”
“Oh, come on, Gainor. Paul mentioned the IC Linguistics Board recording conversations. Myra mentioned her father being privy to such recordings. I know it’s against the conventions and has to be deniable, but still…”
He scowled. “No. We haven’t listened on their retirement planets. There aren’t any humans on retirement planets. The lexicon project may have been the only time.”
“There have to be some other races who go there? The Derac aren’t capable of building anything themselves.”
He stared at me, eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s what Paul said. It seems the ships have a social structure s
o rigid that very few words are needed, but Paul says the Derac actually change at some point in their lives, and that’s when they retire to a planet and adopt a new culture. Rather as humankind did, fifty thousand years ago when we all of a sudden acquired opinions and vocabulary. When the Derac reach a certain point in their lives, they do the same. They lie about in the sun and discuss their philosophy of life, so that would be the place to put your listeners. You’re in good with the Tharst, aren’t you? They build things for other races, and those orbs they float around in have veiling capabilities, don’t they?”
He gave me a look, slightly surprised, slightly amused. “Jewel, I’m noticing a devious part of you that I had not seen before. Tell me, is Paul taking his concs?”
I gritted my teeth. “Naturally! My hope is he won’t have time to pay any attention to them. They’re so idiotic!”
Gainor grimaced, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands across his expansive belly. He dropped his voice to say, “You know, don’t you, that concs are the real tabula rasa, the blank slate upon which anyone may write what he pleases. Or she pleases.”
“I’ve only known Paul’s, really. Oh, I’ve seen them in the pod lobbies and carrying packages, but…”
“Paul created their idiocy, Jewel, believe me. An acquaintance of mine has one that plays chess, rather well. And I know of one that dances beautifully. In each case, that’s what the ‘owner’ wanted. Or needed.” He sighed, stared at the ceiling for a moment. “Did you know the birthrate on Earth has dropped by some 80 percent since the concs were…introduced?”
I stared at him openmouthed. “Eighty percent? Are you sure?” I blurted it rather too loudly.
He put his finger to his lips and chuckled without amusement. “Oh, yes, Jewel, quite sure. Sure enough to make me wonder if they were put here for that purpose.”