Chapter Ten
'Animals,' she gasped, when she finally got the meaning. 'They are animals.'
'An interesting word,' said her assistant, Lady Belfae. 'A word out of prehistory.'
'Their young are.' She hesitated, searching for an Artonuee word. 'Changed alive. They are ripped from the mother’s body alive.'
'Animals,' agreed Lady Belfae.
It was the only analogy. The early writings told of them. Small, scurrying things on the old World, things which preyed on the unhatched eggs of the Artonuee. Things which, in self-defense, they exterminated.
She was healed. The operation left no scars. It had merely removed her unfertilized eggs artificially. But there was a scar inside, on her mind.
She hated them, the Delanians. Loathesome, animalistic, ugly.
Not true. Not ugly.
Before her, to help her understand, were pictures. The alien at rest,
walking, moving, undressed showing his maleness, standing on the Cliffs of Flight looking out over the inland sea. Not ugly. Tall, powerful, graceful in his way. Not much thicker in torso than an Artonuee male and possessed of the same general features, although his eyes were small and his legs longer, seemingly made for the covering, in a short time, of vast distances.
But not ugly.
And, in all fairness, it was his evolution which determined that he would be ripped alive from his mother’s body like an animal.
'That there is evolution is undeniable,' a consultant told her. 'Fossil remains show us our ancestors, incredibly ancient, small, ill-formed, brains the size of a jenk seed. And there are other evidences. The forms of the exterminated animals of the old World changed over the ages. In defense of your alien, I wonder what the ages would have done to the animals if we had not destroyed them?'
'He is an intelligent being,' she told herself, listening to a voice on the tapes, the grating sounds no longer so painful. 'In many ways he must be superior to us, at least in technology, for he has traveled the stars. I must give him his due. I must approach him as an equal.'
And, when she could think in Delanian, although that term was no longer relevant, since she now knew the names with which the aliens labeled themselves, she told herself that she was ready. She had learned much.
The existence of two sexes was more important to the Delanians than to the Artonuee. Language was feminine in the Artonuee system. The Delanians differentiated in their language. Hers and his were the same, only different. Since there was no evidence of being able to share thoughts among the Delanians, their language was far more complicated. Concepts which were expressed among the Artonuee with one quick picture—perhaps, in some cases, combined with sound—required long, complicated, roundabout explanation in the words of the Delanians.
It was only with the help of the Research Quad main computer and through long, hard hours of concentration that she was able to board the driver to The World with some confidence that she would be able to converse intelligently with the alien.
And on the night prior to the meeting, there was still some doubt in her mind. She tried to master it. Then she tried to sleep with that aching loneliness inside her, that feeling of loss. She awoke irritable, feeling the effect of planet change. On New World, she would be in the middle of a work day. Here at home—this merely a phrase, since she had not seen the surface of The World since her days as a changeling—it was dawn. The sun was warmer, more friendly. As it began to light the darkness, it seemed to be more powerful, dimming the evil fire of the collisions in its brilliance. She bowed to the shrine provided in each guest room.
'Be with me, Mother.' The prayer was brief, but in a very real way, her very thoughts were a continuation of her supplication. Perhaps the priests of her youth were right. Perhaps it was possible for God to forgive. Old Jarvel, senior member of the male minority in the Interplanetary Council, called in to hear the astounding news that the Artonuee were not alone in facing God’s Fires, paled, fell to his knees.
'They are God’s messengers,' old Jarvel said, spittle running down his chin. He was long overdue for his homecoming, but his importance as the leading spokesman for Artonuee males seemed, somehow, to put renewed life into his ancient carcass. 'If it is indeed true that they have bested God’s Constant, that must be construed as a sign.'
When he had gone, however, the Lady Jonea, with a wry smile, said,
'Or it is a sign that God, all along, has been largely in the minds of the Artonuee.'
Cynicism seemed to increase with age in a female, Miaree observed.
But she did not voice her hopes in prayer to the shrine. Instead, she paid lip service to God and, as she robed herself in purple, wings hidden in modesty, she indulged in an if-you-are-really-there soliloquy. If you are really there you must be God of the Delanians, too, for our concept of an omnipotent God is incompatible with the idea that another race in our own galaxy would find a different God. It was, she felt, an all-or-nothing thing. Either God was God of all the universe or was God of nothing. And, even more daringly, if God were God of the Artonuee alone, then Her power was limited and therefore subject to dispute.
The males said that the seeds of atheism were in every female and that the very act of flying was in defiance of God. So, she decided, since she had been fighting God all her life, she would now carry with her across the
inland sea a will to fight harder than ever, to use the chink in God’s armor—namely the fact that the Delanians had traveled in space at multiples of light speed—to destroy God’s last hold over the Artonuee.
With the help of the Delanians’ vast power, that power which blinked with the forces of a living sun, she would rescue the life force of the Artonuee from the doom which, as the sun burned through a morning ground haze, dimmed into insignificance in the bright, daytime sky.
'Mother Piiree,' she said, having finished her breakfast which included the rare treat of ripe juplee fruit, 'you may tell the workers that I am ready.'
The small floater, with two young and curious males as crew, flew before the wind which blew, ever constant, toward the Cliffs of Flight. The sea was white-capped. The unaccustomed motion, however, could not break through Miaree’s concentration as she rehearsed her welcoming speech to the man from the Constellation of Delan. The floater’s storage cells fed on the energy of the sun, pushed the floater with pumped jets of water, hummed quietly. The wind cooled her, fluttered her purple robe. Overhead, a female changeling soared, ungainly on her tiny wings, ignoring the floater as she sped across the waters to her destiny. And ahead, the cliffs rose from the sea, tall, barren, harsh.
The alien had shed his bulky space suit and was standing on a high crag, eyes shaded against the morning sun.
The landing point was a distance to his right. He noted the direction of the boat, walked along the top of the cliffs, careful not to disturb the changelings as they shed their baby skin in graceful, feminine movements. He awaited as Miaree climbed a rude flight of steps carved into the rock. He had not known what to expect, but he had formed a theory. He was not surprised to see, standing before him, slim and regal, soft, flexible lips fixed in a formal smile, a perfected adult of the charming little creatures who had fed him, who had wet his parched lips with sweet water. He extended both hands in a gesture of friendship.
'On behalf of the Interplanetary Council and The Mother, I extend you greetings,' Miaree said.
'You, my dear,' said Rei, known as the Delanian, 'are indescribably beautiful.'
Chapter Eleven
And so much, my young friends, for interplanetary diplomacy. Or was it, Stella, the most propitious thing that
