"A spacecraft?" Pawasar Pawasar Ras, Aissur Aissur Rus, and Voskop W Wurd said it in the Foitani language, Jennifer and Greenberg in Spanglish.
Voskop W Wurd recovered first. He shouted in the Foitani language. "Shoot the foul-smelling thing down," the translator said. "Your ships and mine together, Oderna. We can kill each other any time we choose. The kwopillot will not wait."
"That is a reasonable assessment of the situation," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said after a moment's pause for thought. He spoke to the ceiling. "All ships from Odern are directed to destroy the spacecraft which has arisen from the Great Unknown. Warleader Voskop W Wurd instructs Rof Golani ships to cooperate in this effort."
"Missiles launching," the ceiling speaker reported.
Voskop W Wurd bared his teeth. "This is not a proper headquarters, Pawasar Pawasar Ras. If I cannot bite the foe in person, at least let me see how my fellows' fangs sink in."
"As you wish," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said after another pause. "I do not think you or your followers would be in a good position to betray us." He rapped on the wall behind him, then hurried through the door he had called into being. Aissur Aissur Rus and his other aides followed. The Foitani from Rof Golan were right behind.
The Rof Golani did not bother making the doorway close after themselves. "Come on," Jennifer said to Greenberg. "If we follow them, we may get some idea of what's going on."
"We may get our heads bitten off, too—literally, if the Rof Golani have anything to say about it," he answered. All the same, he went after the Foitani. So did Jennifer.
They had to trot to catch up with the bigger aliens, then to keep up with them. A couple of Rof Golani snarled at them, but otherwise left them alone. They hurried into the command post hard on Voskop W Wurd's heels.
The plan had been chaotic enough before the Rof Golani came in. Foitani from Odern ran here and there, shouted at one another and into headsets, pointed at screens and holovid radar plots. A couple of the dark blue Foitani turned in threatening fashion toward the gray-blue interlopers from Rof Golan. Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "They are become our cobelligerents against the flying tower. Furnish Voskop W Wurd with communications gear, that he may command his spacecraft to cooperate with us against the common foe, for kwopillot cannot be other than the enemies of all proper Foitani."
One of the Foitani from Odern gave Voskop W Wurd a headset. He screamed into it. Watching one of the radar tanks, Jennifer saw red sparks begin to move in unison with blue ones as both colors converged on a bigger white point of light.
Greenberg was watching the tank, too. He said, "The Rof Golani came here intending to smash up Gilver. They ought to be able to blow the tower into the middle of next week, no matter how big it is."
"Do we want them to?" Jennifer asked. "I know they say the old-time Foitani are evil and vicious, but as far as I can see, they're just acting the same way the modern ones do. And since when are aliens' sex lives any of our business?"
"I'd feel better about being neutral if we still had a way home in case the Great Ones wrecked the Harold Meeker," he answered. "As long as it's sitting outside this base, I'm for the Foitani from Odern and Rof Golan."
"Something to that," Jennifer had to admit
She and Greenberg did their best to stay out from underfoot as Foitani hurried this way and that. Jumping clear was all up to them, for the Foitani would not change directions for their sake. Jennifer wondered if that was because humans were too small for Foitani to bother noticing, or just because they were non-Foitani and therefore not worth dodging. Whichever way it was—she suspected the latter—she quickly learned to grow eyes in the back of her head to keep from getting trampled.
A Rof Golani ship abruptly vanished from the radar tank. Voskop W Wurd screamed something that the translator rendered as, "How extremely unfortunate." A good deal of juice seemed to have been squeezed out somewhere.
More ships started disappearing. No matter what sort of Foitani perverts crewed it, no matter that it had been grounded for twenty-eight thousand years, the ship that had been a tower was a formidable killing machine. Voskop W Wurd made noises suggesting a wild animal with a leg caught in a trap. Pawasar Pawasar Ras sounded calmer—that seemed the way on Odern—but no happier.
After a dismayingly short while, the course of the battle grew clear: the Great Ones were mopping up everything the modern Foitani could throw at them. Pawasar Pawasar Ras ordered one of his few surviving ships to break off and head back to Odern.
Voskop W Wurd yowled a phrase that sounded as if it would have made a pretty good operations order for the end of the world. "A cowardly act," the translator reported bloodlessly.
"By no means," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "Suppose we are defeated and destroyed here. That will leave the kwopillot free to rampage through the Foitani sphere, with no one to know what they are until they come within smelling range. Our homeworlds must be warned. What I do is wisdom. Deny it if you may."
The Rof Golani warleader did not reply directly, but spoke into his headset. Before long, one of the red blips in the radar tank turned tail and boosted toward hyperdrive kick-in. Voskop W Wurd said no more about it. No Foitan Jennifer had ever seen was any good at admitting he was wrong.
"I just hope the Foitani sphere is all these revived Great Ones worry about for a while," Greenberg said. "If they have records of humans, they know where Earth is."
"They'd find out soon enough anyway, from dealing with the Foitani from Odern," Jennifer answered. It was not much consolation. One way or another, trouble was coming.
Trouble was, in fact, already here. The ship that had spent a geological epoch being a tower was still dreadfully efficient in its own role. Gallant to the end, the Foitani from Odern and Rof Golan kept attacking long after they must have known they were doomed. Back on Earth, a long time ago, tribesmen had shown insane courage by charging straight at machine-gun nests. But for making them end up dead in gruesomely large numbers, their courage hadn't got them anything. Similar bravery served the Foitani no better now.
"Attack from space imminent," Pawasar Pawasar Ras called. "Prepare to resist to the end."
Jennifer was certain the Foitani would do just that. She was also certain the end had become quite imminent. She squeezed Bernard Greenberg's hand, hard. "I love you, too," she said. When the end comes, some words should not be left unspoken.
He hugged her. She hugged him, too. She did not care what the Foitani thought, not now. The only good thing she saw about being here was that the end would probably be quick. The Great Ones up there had overwhelming weapons and could hardly miss.
Voskop W Wurd said, "Get me a hand weapon, Oderna, that I may shoot at my slayers as they destroy me."
Jennifer watched the tower-ship in the radar tank. It hung overhead, an outsized sword of Damocles. Suddenly one of the communications screens lit up. A green-blue Foitani face peered out of it: a Great One. A technician spoke to Pawasar Pawasar Ras. "Honored kin-group leader, the, ah, Foitan Solut Mek Kem would address you."
Jennifer's heart leaped. Surely one did not seek to address a person one was on the very point of destroying.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras saw things in a different light. He said, "So you have called to gloat, have you, kwopil?" Jennifer's hopes plunged as far and as fast as they had risen. Pawasar Pawasar Ras could not help knowing his own species, knowing what its members did and did not do.
The Great One called Solut Mek Kem said, "By your murderousness, I gather your kind still exists, vodran." Jennifer felt like screaming at the translator program for falling asleep on the words that really mattered. Meanwhile, Solut Mek Kem went on, "We all hoped earthgrip would have taken you by the time we returned to the sphere at large."
But for once, the problem was not the translator's fault. Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "Vodran? I do not know this word, Solut Mek Kem."
Voskop W Wurd echoed him, less politely: "Trust the stinking kwopillot to come up with a foul-smelling name for proper people."
"You've grown old in depravity, to think it the proper state for Foitani," Solut Mek Kem said. "I see the race has had time to degenerate physically as well as morally, else our sphere would not be plagued with such hideous specimens as you."
Voskop W Wurd told the Great One what he—or was it she this time?—could do to himself, in explicit anatomical detail. Jennifer did not think any of the suggestions sounded like much fun and did not think many were physically possible. Those limitations didn't bother humans in a temper, and they didn't bother Voskop W Wurd, either.
When the Rof Golani warleader ran down, Pawasar Pawasar Ras added, "You tax us with murderousness, yet outside this tower which is now a ship, you kwopillot wantonly slaughtered a great many Foitani, many of them unarmed and all of them mentally disabled by whatever means you employed to keep us from your precinct on Gilver."
"You are vodranet," Solut Mek Kem said. "You deserve no better. As I said, we had hoped our fellows would have exterminated you from the galaxy by the time we reawakened. Though I see it is not so, we shall join with the worlds of our kind and finish the job once and for all."
"What worlds of your own kind?" Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "Kwopillot have no worlds. They merely plague true Foitani whenever a nest of them appears. This is so on every world where our kind survives, and has been so ever since the Suicide Wars cast our sphere down into barbarism."
"Lie all you like, vodran," the old-time Foitan said. "We could not have been destroyed in a few centuries."
Jennifer hurried over to Pawasar Pawasar Ras and tugged on the fur of his flank. "May I speak to the Great One?" she asked urgently.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras brushed her away, or tried to. She hung onto his massive arm. "Are you stricken mad?" he said. "Get away. This is not your concern."
Unexpectedly, Voskop W Wurd came to her rescue. "Why not let the creature talk to the stinking kwopillot?" he demanded. "Do kwopillot deserve any better?"
"There is some truth in what you say, warleader," Pawasar Pawasar Ras admitted. Under other circumstances, Jennifer would have been furious at the denigration inherent in what the Rof Golani Foitan said and in Pawasar Pawasar Ras's agreement with it. Now all she cared about was having this Solut Mek Kem hear her. After a pause for thought that seemed endless, Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "Very well, human Jennifer, you may speak. Here." He overturned a plastic container for her. "Stand on this, so you will be tall enough for the vision pickup to notice you. I shall stand close by, that my translator may render your words into the speech of the Great Ones."
"Thank you, honored kin-group leader." Jennifer clambered onto the container. She could tell Solut Mek Kem saw her; the old-time Foitan's teeth came out. She said, "Honored Foitan—"
"So you vodranet consort with sub-Foitani, do you?" Solut Mek Kem interrupted. "We might have expected it of you."
"Will you listen to me?" Jennifer said. "Your tower hasn't been sitting on Gilver for a few centuries. You've been there twenty-eight thousand of your years."
"It is amusing, vodran." Solut Mek Kem still refused to speak directly to Jennifer. "But why should I listen to its lies any more than yours?"
"I presume your tower or spaceship or whatever it really is recorded Bernard and me when we went inside," Jennifer said. "Check those records, why don't you? For one thing, you'll see we have stunners that aren't like yours. For another, you'll see one of your people comparing us to—I don't know whether they're specimens or records of my kind back when we were savages. You figure out how long it might take for a race to go from savages to star travelers. And if I'm lying, then you can go right on ignoring me."
The screen that had shown Solut Mek Kem went blank. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "Well done, human Jennifer. You have made the wicked pervert pause and examine assumptions, something we did not succeed in accomplishing."
Bernard Greenberg said, "You ought to think about examining your own assumptions, Aissur Aissur Rus. Since when is someone who differs sexually from you necessarily a pervert—or necessarily wicked, for that matter?"
"Kwopillot are wicked perverts," Aissur Aissur Rus said.
Jennifer felt like banging her head against a wall; Aissur Aissur Rus not only wasn't examining his assumptions, he hadn't even noticed them. She asked, "What's a vodran?"
"We do not know this word, either," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "It is a piece of offal the kwopillot have appended to the pure and beautiful speech of the Great Ones, nothing more."
Just then, Solut Mek Kem reappeared in the holovid screen. "I will converse with the sub-Foitani creature," he announced.
"We call ourselves humans," Jennifer said pointedly.
The Great Ones, whether perverted or not, had all the arrogance of their descendants and then some. Solut Mek Kem said, "I care nothing for what you call yourself, creature. I have some concern, however, over your statements. It appears true that Foitani encountered your kind in the past. You were noted as being uncommonly brutish and scheduled for extermination. Why this failed to take place is a matter of some puzzlement to me."
Jennifer opened her mouth, then closed it again. Hearing that her species was going to have been killed off was not something she could take in at once. Into her silence, Aissur Aissur Rus said, "No doubt the Suicide Wars intervened and prevented the Foitani of that distant time from completing the protocol they envisioned."
"Suicide Wars?" It was Solut Mek Kem's turn to pause. Not even a Foitan could care for the sound of that.
"Suicide Wars," Aissur Aissur Rus repeated. He spoke to the command center's computer system. A holovid star map appeared in front of him. "This is the area the Foitani once inhabited, not so?"
"No. Wait. Yes, it appears to be," Solut Mek Kem said. "We customarily oriented our maps with the other direction to the top, thus my brief confusion."
"One more thing about the Great Ones of which we were ignorant," Aissur Aissur Rus observed before returning to the business at hand. "These are the known Foitani worlds now." The few points of light Dargnil Dargnil Lin had shown Jennifer back on Odern now sparkled in front of her. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "All other worlds within the sphere are devoid of our kind, or even of intelligent sub-Foitani life forms."
"More vodran lies, fabrications to confuse me," Solut Mek Kem said.
"If you will arrange a data link with us, we will supply you with documentation sufficient to change your mind," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "We could not have prepared this volume of information in advance to trick you, you will realize, because we had no idea we would discover you alive in the tower, and still less that you would prove to be kwopillot." More flexible than most of his kind, Aissur Aissur Rus managed not to affix a malodorous epithet to the term.
"Send your data," Solut Mek Kem said. "The Vengeance will refrain from destroying you until they are evaluated—you are no spacecraft, and cannot run. But woe betide you if we detect falsehood. It will only make your fate the harsher."
How could any fate be worse than destruction? Jennifer wondered. She did not speak her thought aloud. The Foitani might have answers to questions like that.
"Did you notice the name of the ship?" Bernard Greenberg said. "The old-time Foitani who set up the Great Unknown must have figured their side might not win the war. I wonder if they figured no one would win it."
Jennifer thought about the map Aissur Aissur Rus had shown to Solut Mek Kem. She thought about the sphere the Foitani had once ruled, about the handful of worlds they still inhabited. She thought about how many other species the imperial Foitani must have destroyed, about the calm way Solut Mek Kem remarked that humanity was on their list. Softly, she said, "Maybe that's just as well."
"Maybe it is," Greenberg agreed.
The Foitani in the command center seemed to have forgotten about the humans again, now that Jennifer had bought them some time. That was typical of them, she thought, but she could not make herself angry. She only wished they'd never heard of her in the first place.
Solut Mek Kem came back on the screen after perhaps half an hour. He said, "Our computers have been analyzing and summarizing the information you are presenting to us. The problem does seem rather more complex than we may have envisioned."
From a Foitan, even so small an admission had to spring from profound shock. Jennifer realized that at once. She wondered if Pawasar Pawasar Ras or Voskop W Wurd would see it. To them, it might be taken as only a sign of weakness. Before either of them could speak, she climbed on the plastic box and said loudly, "Then you agree it's wiser to talk, Solut Mek Kem, than to try to fight off every starship from every Foitani world that still knows about spaceflight?"
Pawasar Pawasar Ras growled at her. Voskop W Wurd snarled at her and took a step in her direction. His clawed hands stretched greedily toward her. She felt like Miles Vorkosigan—much too small and extremely breakable. How would the Middle English SF hero have handled this particular mess? Audacity, that was his only way. She went on quickly, not giving any Foitan a chance to talk: "A peace conference seems the appropriate solution, don't you all think? None of the modern Foitani are likely to get any of the technology of the Great Ones without peace, unless the Vengeance shoots it at them. And you Foitani from long ago will only be hounded all through this sphere unless you come to some kind of terms with your modern relatives."
"Peace with vodranet? Never," Solut Mek Kem said.
"Talk with kwopillot? I'd sooner claw my own belly open," Voskop W Wurd said.
Jennifer glumly waited for whatever bellicose ranting Pawasar Pawasar Ras chose. But before the honored kin-group leader could get a rant in edgewise, Aissur Aissur Rus said, "Save over communicators, how can we talk with those on board the Vengeance?" Again, he had sense enough to keep to himself the slurs he was no doubt thinking. "If we and they come into the same room, their smell will make us want only to kill, and ours no doubt the same with them."
Jennifer felt like kissing him, no matter how repugnant he might find it. How could be solved; never left little room for negotiation. She said, "If you wanted to meet face-to-face, as I can see you might, do you have nose filters to keep your two sides from smelling each other?"
"We would still know they were kwopillot," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.
Voskop W Wurd put it more pungently. "I'd smell that perverts' reek if you cut off my nose."
Solut Mek Kem seemed no more enthusiastic. The kwopil said, "Better to exterminate all vodranet and begin to populate the sphere anew with Foitani who have not been altered to the point of degeneracy and decay."
"You are the altered ones, you kwopillot," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.
Jennifer filed that away for further consideration; she had more pressing business now. She said, "Don't you think, kwopillot and vodranet, both sides have done enough exterminating here? Aissur Aissur Rus, call up those maps of how your sphere looked in the days of the Great Ones and how it is now."
Aissur Aissur Rus did as she asked. The few points of light that still glowed in what had been a great shining globe told their own story. Another round of war at that intensity might leave no Foitani of any sexual persuasion alive anywhere. The projection was plain enough for even the big aliens to get outside their ideologies and notice it.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras saw. He said, "You can destroy us here on Gilver, kwopillot, but I doubt you can destroy all our worlds without being slain yourselves in the attempt."
"Let's fight them now," Voskop W Wurd said. "The more damage we do to them, the easier a time the attackers who come after us will have." Some people, Jennifer thought, did not want to get the message. But even one of Voskop W Wurd's subordinates took the warleader aside and spoke urgently to him.
Solut Mek Kem said, "What a dolorous choice: the galaxy without Foitani or full of accursed vodranet. We shall have to consult among ourselves as to which alternative appears preferable." He disappeared from the screen.
"Talking with kwopillot!" Pawasar Pawasar Ras shook his head in a very human gesture of bewilderment and dismay. "Who would have supposed it would come to that?"
"You know, one of the things Foitani really need to learn, if you'll forgive my telling you, is diplomacy," Bernard Greenberg said. "The Great Ones never seemed to have used it—they were always one people themselves, and other races were just there to be exploited or massacred. Then when they had this split into kwopillot and vodranet, the only thing they knew how to do with beings who were different was kill them. There are other choices. You Foitani from Odern and Rof Golan—and I suppose your other starfaring races—are starting to get the idea, because you have to deal with each other, and I suppose also because you have the old-time Suicide Wars as a horrible example. But none of you is what you'd call good at dealing with anybody from outside your own immediate group."
"He's right," Jennifer said. "Now you're all in a place where you can see that a big war isn't the right answer, but you don't have any other weapons—you should pardon the expression—handy with which to attack the problem."
"War is simple and direct. Its answers are clear-cut," Voskop W Wurd said.
"A writer of my species once said that, for any problem, there is always a solution that is simple, obvious—and wrong," Jennifer answered. Voskop W Wurd started to snarl at her, then stopped, looking as thoughtful as any Rof Golani Foitan she'd ever seen. She suddenly laughed. Here she was, doing exactly what the Foitani from Odern had kidnapped her to do—using her knowledge of human literature—even if not science fiction this time—to help them deal with the problem of the Great Ones.
Solut Mek Kem, who personified the problem of the Great Ones, came back onto the screen in front of Pawasar Pawasar Ras. The kwopil said, "We will speak with you, unless you would rather fight." By the way that came out in the Spanglish, and by the way he let his teeth show, Jennifer guessed he was half hoping for a battle.
"We will talk with you," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "War is the obvious solution; but for every question, there is an answer that is obvious, simple, and wrong."
"An interesting point of view," Solut Mek Kem said. Jennifer didn't know whether to be angry at Pawasar Pawasar Ras for taking her thought without giving her credit or glad he had listened to her. She got little time to think it over, for Solut Mek Kem went on, "In any case, we will also talk, I suppose. Do you possess nose filters such as the yellow-haired creature suggested? They might keep our two sides from fighting whether we so intend or not. The odor of vodranet cannot help but inflame us."
"I will put our technical staff to work fabricating filters," Pawasar Pawasar Ras answered. "We are similarly aroused—and not in any sexual sense, I assure you—by the way kwopillot smell. As for these non-Foitani, they are without a doubt ugly, but they have their uses."
From a Foitan, Jennifer knew, that was about as good a recommendation as she was likely to get.
Just when all seemed sweetness and light—or as close to sweetness and light as was practicable after ground and space combat between two groups each of which wished extinction upon the other—Voskop W Wurd reminded everyone that there were in fact not two groups involved, but three: "Nose filters? I don't give a putrescent fart about nose filters. I don't have to smell kwopillot to know they stink, either. Let them come after Rof Golan if they've the stomachs for it. We'll blast them into incandescent gas, and better than they deserve, too."
"Oh, shut up, you hotheaded fool," Aissur Aissur Rus said—hardly diplomatic language, but the most direct statement Jennifer had yet heard out of a Foitan from Odern.
Greenberg added, "Voskop W Wurd, think about this: Suppose they blast your people on Rof Golan into incandescent gas instead? That sort of thing happened all the time during the Suicide Wars. Wouldn't you rather talk first and then fight, given the chance? Think of it in terms of tactics if you don't understand diplomacy. Before you start a war, you ought to learn about your enemies."
"I know they are kwopillot. What more do I need?"
"You might remember they're also Great Ones," Jennifer said. "And remember how many ships you just lost. You might even remember that if the Foitani from Odern do talk with them and you don't, they might make common cause and leave you out in the cold."
"We would not do that," Pawasar Pawasar Ras and Aissur Aissur Rus protested in the same breath, so perfectly in chorus that the translator turned the two sets of identical words into a single sentence. Were less riding on this ticklish situation, it might have been funny.
However pious their protest, the two Foitani from Odern failed to convince Voskop W Wurd. "Of course you would, if you saw any advantage to it," he said. "You Oderna are like that, and what's more, you know it perfectly well. But if you think you'll make a deal with the perverts behind my back, think again. This creature has given me a good reason to enter into these talks: to keep you as honest as may be."
"Congratulations," Greenberg told Jennifer. "You've just made this a problem with three sides instead of two. Now the Rof Golani are ready to take on the Foitani from Odern again."
"Maybe there are three sides, but they're all going to talk," Jennifer answered. "When there were just two, they weren't talking. Sometimes even going backward is progress."
"I'm sure the Foitani from Odern would have agreed with you, the way they blindly loved the Great Ones till they found this batch of kwopillot."
Before Jennifer could answer, Solut Mek Kem said, "If we are to enter into these distasteful discussions, vodranet, let us begin. We will send down a flier to bring your representatives back here to the Vengeance."
"Come up into your lair?" Voskop W Wurd exclaimed. "Do you take me for a male altogether bereft of his senses? Treating with the Oderna is quite bad enough. Why should I tamely walk in and let you do as you would with me?"
"The wiser course would be for your envoys to come down to this research station," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.
"That will not happen," Solut Mek Kem said at once. "We have already seen how you treat our kind when we approach this research base of yours. You merely seek the opportunity to dispose of our representatives quietly."
"Your behavior toward the Rof Golani in the precinct of the Great Unknown and toward the fliers of both sides in our recent dispute naturally leaves us suspicious of your good intentions," Aissur Aissur Rus said.
"We will not meet with you inside your station," Solut Mek Kem said.
"We will not meet with you inside your spaceship," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.
"I wouldn't want to meet you kwopillot squatting over a waste-disposal hole," Voskop W Wurd added.
"These talks aren't off to what the diplomats call a constructive start," Greenberg observed.
Jennifer could only reply with a mournful shake of her head. If the parties allegedly negotiating couldn't even agree on where they would allegedly negotiate, the alleged negotiations looked anything but promising.
Then she said, "If the one side won't come down here and the other won't go up there, why don't you all come to the human ship, the Harold Meeker?"
"Yes, why not?" Greenberg chimed in. Under his breath, he added for her ears alone, "Anything to start this moving and give us a chance to get out of here." Jennifer let out a small, silent sigh of relief; it was his ship, after all, that she'd just proposed as a negotiation site.
"Come aboard the human ship for these discussions?" Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "I would almost prefer bearding the kwopillot in their den." Jennifer blinked and wondered what the literal Foitani version was of the phrase the translator had rendered in that fashion.
"Go aboard a ship constructed by creatures?" Solut Mek Kem said. "We do not treat with creatures; we destroy them."
"You wouldn't be treating with us. You'd be treating with Pawasar Pawasar Ras and Voskop W Wurd," Greenberg said. "I might add, just so you know, we humans range across as much space as you Foitani did when your empire was at its height."
"You are telling me you are widespread and dangerous vermin," Solut Mek Kem said.
"I'm telling you we're widespread and dangerous, yes," Greenberg answered, "But to us, you are the vermin. You'd better bear it in mind."
Solut Mek Kem snarled at that. So did Voskop W Wurd. So did Pawasar Pawasar Ras, but not as loudly. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "Unlike others here, I have been into human space. They lack our race's straightforward character, but are not to be taken lightly. Success is the best measure of a species' true attributes; by that standard, their attributes are formidable indeed."
"They are small and weak and ugly." This time Solut Mek Kem and Voskop W Wurd said the same thing together. Neither looked happy at agreeing with the other.
Well, you Foitani are big and fuzzy and vicious, Jennifer thought. She kept it to herself. Studied insult of the sort Greenberg had given was one way of breaking through the arrogant contempt with which the Foitani viewed those who were not of their kind. Indulged in too often, though, it degenerated into name-calling of the sort five-year-olds used when they argued over toys.
"Just remember, the Harold Meeker is neutral ground," Greenberg said. Now he sounded calm and reasonable and persuasive: downright diplomatic, Jennifer thought—too bad the translator would wash all tone from his words. He went on, "Neither of you trusts the other's stronghold. If you can't trust my ship, at least all of you can distrust it equally."
"You are in the company of vodranet, creature," Solut Mek Kem said. "Before we would hazard ourselves, we demand the right to examine the proposed chamber for booby traps. Vodran treachery is notorious and despicable."
"Inspect all you like," Greenberg agreed cheerfully.
"We will have monitors present when the putative inspectors board your ship, human Bernard," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "Who knows what kwopillot might install under the pretext of removal?"
"That's fine, too," Greenberg said. "If both kinds of Foitani are going to be on the Harold Meeker at the same time, though, everything had better wait until you get those nose filters designed. I don't want anybody blowing holes in my cargo bay because he doesn't like the way someone else smells."
"One other thing," Jennifer added. "Everyone should remember that ships from Gilver are on their way to Odern and to Rof Golan. They'll probably bring big warfleets back with them. It would be nice to have some sort of agreement by the time those fleets get here. If we don't, I think another round of Suicide Wars starts right here. Is this fight worth your whole species?"
After she asked the question, she realized all flavors of Foitani could be intransigent enough to answer yes. When no one—not even Voskop W Wurd—said anything, she counted that a victory. The modern Foitani still lived in the long horrid shadow of the Suicide Wars; they knew too well what another round of such insensate frenzy would do to their surviving worlds. As for the newly revived Great Ones, perhaps they were still in shock from learning what the rest of their race had done to itself while they lay dormant through the millennia.
Greenberg prodded everyone along. "Have we decided, then, to meet in the cargo hold of the Harold Meeker as soon as nose filters make it possible?"
Again, none of the Foitani said anything. Again, Jennifer counted that a victory.
Being back in the Harold Meeker was almost as good as being home on Saugus, at least when the alternative was the Foitani research base. The lighting felt right to human eyes, the plumbing fixtures were as they should be, the chairs were made for human fundaments—and, best of all, the Foitani kept out of the crew compartment.
They were and stayed busy down in the cargo bay. They moved around boxes and bales to create a clear space on the floor where they installed their own furniture and computer gear. The Great Ones cleared out bugs set by the Foitani from Odern. The Foitani from Odern, in turn, cleared bugs set by the Great Ones. The Foitani from Rof Golan took a turn clearing everyone else's bugs, and, presumably, planting a few of their own.
All the Foitani of whatever race who entered the cargo bay wore a little silvery button in each nostril—"The better not to smell you, my dear," as Jennifer said to Greenberg. The nose filters seemed to work; at least, no fights broke out between kwopillot and vodranet. Greenberg manufactured a little silvery button of his own and left it on an out-of-the-way box. A suspicious Foitan from Rof Golan found it and took it away, either to destroy it or to glean from it what he could of human electronics.
"Good luck to him," Greenberg said when he discovered his little bait had been taken. "It's filled with talcum powder."
He and Jennifer got Foitani electronics to study: they persuaded Aissur Aissur Rus to give them each a translator. "I'm bloody tired of having Foitani talking all around me without the slightest idea of what they're saying," she said.
"True enough," Greenberg said, "but now that we are supposed to understand them all the time, they'll ask more from us. You'll see."
That hardly struck Jennifer as requiring the mantic gift to predict. Greenberg was proved right soon enough, too. All Foitani factions distrusted the humans and affected to despise the Harold Meeker. All of them, however, distrusted their furry fellows even more and actively feared the headquarters of those fellows. Thus Jennifer and Greenberg spent a good deal of their time keeping the Foitani from one another's throats. When the actual discussions started, all factions insisted that the two of them sit in as mediators.
To keep potential carnage to a minimum, only two representatives from each group went inside the trading ship's cargo bay. Pawasar Pawasar Ras and Aissur Aissur Rus spoke for the Foitani from Odern, Solut Mek Kem and a colleague named Nogal Ryn Nyr for the Great Ones, and Voskop W Wurd and his chief aide Yulvot L Reat for the Foitani from Rof Golan.
At the first uneasy meeting, all three sets of purported diplomats spent the first several minutes standing around and glaring. Voskop W Wurd let out a series of ostentatious sniffs. His nose filters must have been working, though, or he would not have been so restrained. Since the Great Ones and the Foitani from Odern seemed willing to ignore him, Jennifer did the same.
She said, "Let's start this off with an issue that I hope we can easily deal with. It doesn't involve any quarrel between the newly revived Foitani and their modern relatives. In fact, it concerns us humans. Solut Mek Kem, do you really have specimen humans aboard your ship"—she almost said, your tower—"or are they just images in your data storage system?"
"The distinction is not as clear as you made it, ignorant alien creature," Solut Mek Kem answered. "They are at present potential, but could be realized in actuality. Do you seek live copies?"
Jennifer gulped. She looked at Greenberg. He seemed shaken, too. Taking a pair of genuine Paleolithic people back to human space would set every anthropologist's pulse racing, and likely would be worth millions. But would it be fair to the poor CroMagnons themselves? Could they ever be anything more than specimens? How could they possibly adjust to twenty-eight millennia of changes?
"Do you seek live copies?" Solut Mek Kem repeated.
"Let us think about that. It's not something we have to decide right now," Jennifer answered. If the cave humans had been frozen so long in Foitani data storage, a little longer wouldn't hurt anything. She went on, "Tell me the meaning of a term you use, one our translator does not interpret: vodran."
"These are vodranet." Solut Mek Kem pointed to the Foitani delegations from Odern and Rof Golan. "They are depraved and disgusting."
"They call you kwopillot, and say you're perverted and revolting," Greenberg said. "We needed a good deal of work, but we finally got them to explain what kwopillot were. I'm not of your species; I make no judgments about what's right or wrong as far as your sexual habits go. But right or wrong, they're an important issue here, one the human Jennifer and I need to understand. Could you please explain to me what makes these Foitani vodranet?"
"Explain to us as well," Aissur Aissur Rus added. "This is not a word my people comprehend."
"Nor mine," Voskop W Wurd said. "What could be vile enough for a stinking kwopil to despise?"
"You could," Nogal Ryn Nyr told him. Aissur Aissur Rus at least grasped the concept of diplomacy, even if he didn't always use it very well. Voskop W Wurd hadn't a clue, and infuriated other people with his own aggressive lack of tact.
"Stay calm, everyone," Jennifer said, wondering how she and Greenberg could make the Foitani stay calm if they didn't feel like it when they were about the size and disposition of a like number of bears. She went on, "We're here to discuss your disagreements rationally, after all." She wished disagreements about sexual habits more readily lent themselves to rational discussion.
"Let's try again," Greenberg said. "Foitani from what is now the ship Vengeance, what are vodranet? We can't have any kind of discussion if we don't all understand what our terms mean."
"Discussing matters pertaining to reproduction is not our custom under most circumstances," Solut Mek Kem said—a view he had in common with Pawasar Pawasar Ras, though he didn't know it. "It is doubly unappetizing when attempting to evaluate manufactured monstrosities such as vodranet."
The Great One obviously bought tact from the same store that had sold it to Voskop W Wurd. The Rof Golani Foitan yelled, "You're the monster, kwopil!"
Greenberg yelled, too. "Enough!" Trying to outshout a Foitan was like trying to hold back a spaceship with bare hands, but he gave it a good game go. "Let Solut Mek Kem finish, will you? You can say whatever you want when he's done."
Fortunately, Aissur Aissur Rus supported him. "Yes, calm yourself, Voskop W Wurd. Gather intelligence before commencing operations." Advice set in a military context seemed to get through to the warleader. He snarled a couple of more times, but subsided.
"Solut Mek Kem?" Jennifer said.
But Solut Mek Kem, again like Pawasar Pawasar Ras, refused to go on. He gestured toward Nogal Ryn Nyr. Let the flunky do the dirty work, Jennifer thought—some attitudes crossed species lines. After a couple of false starts, Nogal Ryn Nyr said, "An unfortunate discovery made long ago is that the sexual physiology of Foitani is all too easy to alter."
"That is true enough," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "The problem of kwopillot would not exist were it otherwise."
"We, obviously, perceive it as the problem of vodranet," Nogal Ryn Nyr said. "And with greater justice, for, after all, vodranet represent a distortion of the original Foitani pattern, which is to say, ourselves."
Jennifer needed a second to grasp the implications of that. The Foitani from Odern and Rof Golan caught on quicker. The bellows of outrage they emitted, however, were so loud and so nearly simultaneous that they overloaded her translator, which produced a noise rather like an asthmatic warning siren.
Finally Voskop W Wurd outroared everyone else. "You lie as bad as you smell! We are the true Foitani, the true descendants of the Great Ones, not you wrongsex badstink perverts."
"Were you there in those days, vodran?" Nogal Ryn Nyr shot back. "How do you know whereof you speak? We can prove what we say, just as, regrettably, you appear to have proved to us the existence of the Suicide Wars and their long and painful aftermath."
"Who would believe proof from a kwopil?" Yulvot L Reat said. By all signs, his charm easily matched that of Voskop W Wurd.
"The suggestion is implausible on the face of it," Aissur Aissur Rus said, more politely but just as certainly. "How is it that all modern Foitani worlds are populated by normal Foitani—Foitani I would judge normal, at any rate—and kwopillot are universally reckoned aberrations?"
"The reason is painful to me but nonetheless obvious," Nogal Ryn Nyr said. "It appears that, insofar as the Suicide Wars had winners, those winners are vodranet. No doubt massacres on planets reduced to barbarism completed the overthrow of normality by—your type."
In her mind, Jennifer saw mobs of big, green-blue aliens rampaging through bombed-out cities, sniffing like bloodhounds for the hated scent of those different from themselves. Would there have been massacres at a time like that? By all she knew, the Foitani were appallingly good at massacres; they almost seemed the chief sport of the species, as battleball was for humans. The picture Nogal Ryn Nyr painted had an air of verisimilitude that worried her.
It convinced Voskop W Wurd, too; he said, "You deserve being massacred."
"We thought the same of vodranet, I assure you," Nogal Ryn Nyr said. "Our chief mistake appears to have been waiting too long before attempting to stamp you out."
"I will believe none of this without proof," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "Nothing impedes you from making any claim you like, simply for the purpose of improving your own position at these discussions."
Solut Mek Kem tossed a silvery wafer onto the table, then, after some hesitation, another one, the latter in the direction of Voskop W Wurd and Yulvot L Real. "Here are the data," he said. "Shall we adjourn until you have put them in your computers and had the opportunity to evaluate them?"
"Let's wait one Gilver day—no more," Greenberg said. "Remember, fleets are on the way. You can start the fighting all over again, if you like."
Jennifer waited for Voskop W Wurd to say that was a good idea. But even the Rof Golani warleader kept quiet. He picked up the little data storage device as if it were a bomb. In a way, it was, for it seemed likely to blow away his misconceptions of his species' past. The four modern Foitani were quiet and thoughtful as they left the Harold Meeker's cargo bay. When they were gone, the Great Ones left, too.
"Whew!" Jennifer sagged against a box which Greenberg had neatly labeled foitani electronic widgets. "Far as I'm concerned, the diplomats are welcome to diplomacy. Give me a simple trading run any day."
"You said it, especially when the people we're supposed to keep from each other's throats are as all-around charming as the Foitani," Greenberg said. "Right now, I would kill for a beer; Foitani kibbles and water aren't my idea of a way to unwind."
Jennifer quoted Heinlein. "One more balanced ration will unbalance me."
"I second that," Greenberg said, approving of the sentiment without recognizing the source. He went on, "The other thing is, I don't know whether we ought to be encouraging the Foitani to make peace with each other or to slug it out. If they do band together and have the technology of the Great Ones to use, they could turn into a real handful for the human worlds to deal with. But I can't say I'm eager to think of myself as the fellow who touched off the second round of the Suicide Wars."
"I know." Jennifer turned and thumped her head against the box of widgets, "The trouble with the Foitani is, they have no notion of moderation whatever. Whatever they think, whatever they do, they think it or do it all out, and they're sure anybody who thinks or acts differently deserves nothing better than to have her world blown up. Still, setting them at each other's throats—"
"How could we look at ourselves in a mirror afterward?" Greenberg walked over next to Jennifer and thumped his head, too. "The thing is, as best I can tell, getting them to slaughter each other will be a lot easier than making any sort of peace. And if they do have peace among themselves, how do we keep them from attacking all their neighbors? That seems to be the way they use peace among themselves."
"From time to time, when I remember, I think I'd like to live through this, no matter how it turns out," Jennifer said.
"Me, too." Greenberg made the hair-pulling gesture he must have started using when he had more hair to pull. He said, "I'm going up to the living quarters and take a shower. Maybe once I soak my head, all this will make better sense. Somehow I doubt it, though."
Jennifer rode up the lift with him. As usual, just being in an area designed by humans for humans cheered her up. Even the noise of the plumbing in the refresher chamber as Greenberg washed himself reminded her of other trading ships and of planets where she'd lived. The sound of Foitani plumbing reminded her of nothing but kidnapping and fear.
Greenberg came out with a towel around his middle. "You want a turn?"
"At what?" With a mischievous smile, she pulled down the towel. When Greenberg reached for her, she skipped back. "There, you'll see, the communicator will buzz just as we get started." Her words didn't stop her from undoing the straps of her coveralls.
Just as they got started, the communicator buzzed. Jennifer said something rude. Greenberg said, "You might as well have had that shower." He sounded more resigned than martyred.
Voice replaced the insistent chiming. "Humans Bernard and Jennifer, this is Aissur Aissur Rus. I would like to consult with you concerning the new information presented by the—" He hesitated, plainly not wanting to call them either Great Ones or kwopillot. "—by the recently revived Foitani from the Great Unknown."
"Go ahead," Jennifer said, knowing perfectly well that he would go ahead whether she invited him to or not.
"Although analysis can at this stage be only preliminary, the data appear to possess validity."
"Do they?" Jennifer wasn't surprised. Solut Mek Kem and Nogal Ryn Nyr had seemed very sure of themselves. But if the Great Ones had originally been kwopillot, that made a hash of everything the successor races believed about themselves and their past. In an abstract way, she admired Aissur Aissur Rus for being able to acknowledge that. He had a lot of integrity, but he couldn't be very happy right now.
He said, "As I stated, they appear to." He wasn't going to concede anything he didn't have to, integrity or no. Jennifer supposed she couldn't blame him.
"If they were kwopillot, how did you get to be vodranet?" Greenberg asked. "Did a mutation spread through the species?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes," Aissur Aissur Rus said, and said no more.
Having dealt with Foitani for some time, Jennifer suspected that abrupt silence meant he knew something he didn't care to let out. She tried to figure out what might make him reticent, and asked, "Was it by any chance an artificial mutation?"
More silence from the communicator. Greenberg drew his own conclusions from that and made silent clapping motions. Finally, Aissur Aissur Rus said, "If the records of the kwopillot are to be trusted, it was, yes." The translator was emotionless and Foitani from Odern didn't sound upset even when they were, but Jennifer knew he was anything but happy. He went on, "If they can be believed, our variety of Foitan was—engineered—for no better purpose than increasing the variety of sexual pleasure available to every individual."
"What's wrong with that?" Greenberg said, in spite of Jennifer's frantic shushing motions. With the Foitani attitude about sex, anything that had to do with sensual pleasure was automatically suspect.
Aissur Aissur Rus said, "I can conceive of no greater humiliation. How would you like it if your entire species had been deliberately redesigned, merely to allow a greater number of sexual opportunities to its members?"
Put that way, Jennifer thought, it didn't sound appetizing. It had to be all the more galling for the Foitani, who had spent the millennia since the Suicide Wars thinking their original configuration a horrible perversion.
"No wonder it is so easy to produce kwopillot," Aissur Aissur Rus went on. "They are, after all, merely a reversion to our former evolutionary pattern. If the Great Ones are to be believed, the origins of vodranet—our origins—sprang from the desire of some Foitani at the time to experience both male and female sexual pleasure, which are for us quite different in sensation. Others resisted the introduction of such a radical change into the germ plasm of the race, and the result—the result appears to have been the Suicide Wars."
Jennifer said, "Aissur Aissur Rus, of all the Foitani I've met, regardless of race, you strike me as the most adaptable. The new data from the Great Ones seem to have crushed you. What do the rest of your people think about what you've found out today?"
"Pawasar Pawasar Ras has gone into his quarters. He has spoken to no one. He has forbidden me to discuss this with any person. I have chosen to interpret that to include only Foitani. Our sexual difficulties and conflicts must be of merely academic interest to you humans."
"Not if we end up getting killed on account of them," Greenberg said.
"Yes, that might affect your thinking to some degree," Aissur Aissur Rus admitted. "Nevertheless, although I have always been one to favor the expansion of knowledge by whatever means become available—as witness my recruiting the two of you to help enter the Great Unknown—I would, for the sake of my species' future, be willing, indeed eager, to see that no mention of what we have learned here ever reached Odern."
"The only way to make sure of that would be to destroy the Vengeance," Jennifer said.
"Were it in my power, I would cheerfully do so," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "Unfortunately, however, the kwopillot are much more likely to destroy me. Perhaps the soundest course would be merely to string these discussions along until the fleets from Odern and Rof Golan arrive, and hope they can rid us of the Vengeance—and our problem—once and for all."
"If it is, you've just given the game away," Greenberg pointed out. "Or don't you think the Great Ones are monitoring your radio traffic?"
"I say nothing they could not reason out for themselves," Aissur Aissur Rus answered. "They are depraved and perverse; they are not foolish." That was a distinction most humans would have had trouble drawing; Aissur Aissur Rus was able to be dispassionate even over matters that involved his passions.
"The other thing is, you don't think even full warfleets could beat the Great Ones, so you'd better talk with them," Jennifer said.
"You overstate the case," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "I am in doubt as to the likely outcome. The same must hold true for the kwopillot, else they would feel no need to continue discussions with us."
"You may well be right about that," Jennifer said.
"You humans have sexual deviants; I read of them in some of the materials in your course, human Jennifer. How is it that you have failed to destroy yourselves as a result of this fact?"
"That's a good question," Jennifer said slowly. Aissur Aissur Rus had a knack for asking good questions. That was probably how he'd come to be a leader of the team investigating the Great Unknown. He'd even gotten answers to his questions there, though by now he wished he hadn't.
Greenberg said, "One difference between Foitani and humans is that humans who differ sexually don't stand out in any obvious way like smell. When we fight, we fight about things like religion or politics or race, not sex."
Jennifer had what she thought for a moment was a brilliant idea. Then she realized that if it were all that brilliant, the Foitani would have thought of it for themselves. She threw it out anyway, to let Aissur Aissur Rus shoot it down if he wanted to: "Is there any chance that you and the kwopillot could put on perfumes that would keep you from going berserk at each other's odors?"
"There are no records of this succeeding," he answered. "The pheromones are most distinctive and most different. In any case, we need to be able to perceive these pheromones if we are to function sexually."
"Just a thought," Jennifer said, remembering that she had been about to function sexually before Aissur Aissur Rus called. She wasn't even angry at the Foitan; by now, she was used to getting interrupted.
For a miracle, Aissur Aissur Rus gave up about then and broke the connection. Grinning—he must have been thinking along with her—Greenberg stepped close. "Shall we try again, and see who calls next?"
"Sure, why not?" Then she asked, "What all do you have in the cargo bay, anyhow? A proper science fiction hero—or even heroine—would be able to improvise his way out of trouble with something that had been sitting there all along, just waiting to be used."
"You're welcome to look," Greenberg answered. "If you think you can improvise a way out of this mess with a bunch of trade junk, go right ahead and try."
"Maybe another time," Jennifer said. "Thing was, SF writers had the habit of putting things that would really help into cargo bays. I've got the feeling that real life isn't so considerate."
"The only thing real life has been considerate about is giving me the chance to fall in love with you. Even then, the damned Foitani keep calling at the wrong time."
"They aren't calling right now," Jennifer said softly.
"So they're not. Let's enjoy it while we can."
"What are you doing, human Jennifer?"
"Just examining cargo," she answered. Since the Foitan on the communicator had known her name, it was probably someone from Odern. Whoever it was, he had to have been monitoring her through some of the spy gear aboard the Harold Meeker. If she and Greenberg could sell that alone to one of the more paranoid human intelligence services, they would show a profit for the trip. The only problem there was getting the goods to the marketplace.
Armed with Greenberg's labels, with the computer to give her more details about what was in each crate or box or plastic bag, and with a pry bar, she wandered through the cargo bay, opening packages that looked interesting. A lot of them were interesting: pelts and spices and books and works of art and electronics. She knew she would have had trouble assembling such a rich variety of goods while keeping everything of high quality, as Greenberg had. He deserved his master rating. Somebody back in human space would be sure to want everything the Harold Meeker carried, and want it enough to pay highly for it.
Whether any of it would be of any use in keeping the next round of the Suicide Wars from breaking out was another matter. Maybe the Great Ones would admire some of the sculptures produced by a planet-bound Foitani race with which Odern traded, but that would not keep them from hating the artists as so many vodranet. Maybe the Foitani from Odern made marvelously compact and clever holovid scanners, but that would not keep them from loathing kwopillot or, if the claims of the old imperial Foitani got loose among them—as was very likely—from despising themselves as altered versions of the original Foitani plan they had been trying for so long to emulate.
Frustrated by her complete inability to find anything that might stop big, bluish aliens from massacring one another, Jennifer gave up and went back to the crew compartment. "Any luck?" Greenberg asked when she came out of the lift.
"None. Maybe a little less." She ran her hands through her hair, making tugging motions at it the way Greenberg did. "I should have known better. We don't have a writer stowing away a deus ex machina for us. We're going to have to do this ourselves, with our brains."
"Which haven't done us a whole lot of good so far."
"Isn't that the sad and sorry truth?"
Negotiations resumed the next day. The representatives of the Great Ones started things off by declaring in unison, "We have the solution to this problem."
"You and all your perverts are going to go and commit suicide so you don't bother decent Foitani any more?" Voskop W Wurd asked. From a human or an alien of different character, that would have been sarcasm. Jennifer thought the odds favored Voskop W Wurd's meaning every word of what he said.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "Despite contemplation, I have not come upon anything that so much as approaches such a solution. I would be willing to hear one from any source, even a source as unreliable as kwopillot."
"Yes, tell us," Greenberg urged. "Jennifer and I haven't found anything that looks like an answer, either."
"Very well." Solut Mek Kem spoke for the old-time Foitani now. "The solution is classic in its simplicity. You have seen that vodranet are an unnatural alteration of the true Foitani way of being. Is this so, or not?"
"We see that the Great Ones appear to have been kwopillot, yes," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "Nevertheless, since the Suicide Wars we have built our own reality."
"What you say, though, kwopil, appears to remain in essence true, if bitter," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "If we are to have emulation of the Great Ones as our goal, we must bear this unpalatable fact in mind."
"Excellent," Solut Mek Kem said. "Then to solve the problem of strife between vodranet and proper Foitani, all modern Foitani must abandon their present distorted way of life and become as we are. As you have seen for yourselves, turning a vodran into a proper Foitan is easy—and no wonder, given that you are poor modifications of the true form. In a generation's time, the race can be whole again, and as it always should have been."
"I like the way I am just fine, and if any stinking kwopil has the brass to tell me my get or I would do better as perverts, we'll see how well he does radioactive," Voskop W Wurd said. Great Ones, Foitani from Odern, and Rof Golani had all installed weapons checks outside the Harold Meeker. Had it been otherwise, Jennifer was sure the blue-gray Foitan would have blazed away with everything he had.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras, as was the way of the Oderna, was more restrained but no less certain. "I fail to see how this proposal in any way benefits the Foitani now living within our sphere. We gain nothing from it save the commitment of the kwopillot not to attack. Buying safety with capitulation is always a poor bargain."
"On the contrary: you vodranet gain a great deal. Being as you are, you have lost the possibility for lifelong relationships between the sexes, the cornerstone of Foitani society since time immemorial," Solut Mek Kem said.
"He has something there," Jennifer whispered to Greenberg. Greenberg nodded. Maybe stable home life would be more likely to lead to a stable existence for the species than the serial relationships in which modern Foitani perforce engaged. On the other hand, the Great Ones, while stable among themselves, had wreaked unmitigated havoc on every other race they met. Human notions of right and wrong were anything but universal outside humanity.
Aissur Aissur Rus said, "Perhaps, kwopil, we lack the characteristic you extol. Yet can your kind claim to understand our race's whole nature, as we do? We give birth and sire, nurture and conquer, all of us together. Why should we give that up? If you put the proposition to our species on any surviving world of the sphere, few would choose it."
"Then as I believed from the outset, there is no point to these talks," Solut Mek Kem said. "We will have war."