Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

an equal now than before.

“He will kill you if and when he can,” Morah warned him. “Ypsir is not used to losing face so badly. Only the presence of the other Lords restrained him tonight, for his object is not ours.”

He nodded. “Shall we meet the Altavar now? I don’t care how foul they smell—they almost have to be a breath of fresh air compared to the company we’ve been keeping this night.”

“Come with me,” Yatek Morah said.

The smell was pervasive and pretty much as Morah had warned. On a full stomach it almost made him gag, and he restrained the impulse to do so only with the greatest difficulty and discomfort.

The Altavar were not quite what he expected. They bore a general kinship to the demons of the ice, but only a kinship, in the same sense that Ass was generically related to Commander Krega.

The first thing that struck him was the sheer alienness of the special quarters for the three Altavar. The lighting Was subdued, the furniture odd and blocky and totally unfamiliar in form or function, and there was an odd, figure-eight shaped pool of water to one side. He knew the creatures were watching him with interest, but he couldn’t really tell how. The retractable tentacles and odd, heart-shaped pads on their “heads” were familiar, but their bodies trailed into a large, nearly formless mass that seemed constantly in motion. They did not walk, but oozed as they moved, leaving a slender trail of slime behind them. Obviously none of these creatures could fly, or move very fast at all.

The one nearest to him and Morah moved to a small device and extended a flowing stalklike appendage until it reached the box and actually seemed to enter it through a small compartment on the side. A speaker crackled.

“So this is the one who caused so much trouble, Morah.” The voice, totally electronically synthesized, sounded eerie as the dank enclosure added reverb to its already inhuman tones.

Morah bowed slightly, although whether or not the gesture had any meaning to the creatures couldn’t be known. “He wished to meet you prior to the talks.”

“Why?”

The question seemed addressed to either one of them, and so he answered. “Partly curiosity. Partly to add to my knowledge. And partly because protocol demanded it.”

“Ah, yes, protocol,” the alien replied. “It seems important to your people.” It paused a moment. “You hold yourself well. In many ways you remind us of the one called Kreegan.”

“We were from the same place and in the same profession originally,” he told the Altavar. “I suspect we thought more alike than either of us would have admitted. You respected Kreegan, I know. I hope that I may earn a measure of that respect tomorrow.”

“You and he wished to save your people. This is a normal and natural thing to us, and we weakened out of our compassion. We hope sincerely that we did not err on that basis, for the cost will be far greater to you and infinitely greater to us if we did. It was our original intent, you know, to eliminate a number of your worlds in a carefully measured pattern so” that your technological capabilities would be broken for at least three centuries. This would have allowed us the necessary time to complete this phase of our task.”

He was appalled at this revelation, and the casual way in which it was delivered,’ appalled as Marek Kreegan must have been many years ago when, assuming his rank as Lord of Lilith, he had first met this or some similar Altavar. Say there were nine hundred human worlds, seven hundred of them the civilized worlds. Three billion per civilized world, and an average of a half-billion for the others, would be—The Altavar was talking about eliminating over one trillion, three hundred and twenty billion people! And now, the creature had said, the risk was far greater than that!

He drew in his breath and swallowed hard. “Let me get this straight. You wished to eliminate over a trillion of us so that we could not interfere with your activities for three centuries?”

“It has worked in the past,” the Altavar said calmly. “The last time we did not do it with a civilization it cost us dearly in time, lives, and materiel, and your own civilization is easily ten times the largest we have encountered before.”

So calm, so natural and normal, so clearly confirming much of his thesis about the Altavar and their motives.

“We hope that this time we may reason with your leaders, and avoid all war, but this may not be possible,” the creature continued. “We have studied your people well, and we understand you.”

“Do you, really? I wonder.” All he could see was not a terrible, gruesome alien form and stench, only an entire race of Talant Ypsirs, shorn of any need to be cheery, political, or human in any sense. The Medusans called them demons with no real understanding of how right they were.

“We know your concern,” the Altavar told him. “Once, you see, our race was much like yours. We grew from a single world not unlike your own, although, obviously, evolution took a different path. We breathe the same sort of air, we drink and are made up of the same water. Our cells would be understandable to your biologists. Only the most warlike, competitive races survive to expand, so do not think us any different from you there, either. We, too, had our empire of several hundred worlds. And when faced with threat, we, too, fought. Because our history is so much like your own, we know full well what your Confederacy will do, how it will behave. But we are far older than your kind. Our objectives have changed, our purpose is firm and sure, our entire race committed to a single set of goals and objectives, while yours exists only to exist and to no real purpose. We desire none of your worlds. We desire none of your territory, nor your people.

“But your people will never believe that, for they know no higher purpose. They will not accept, or countenance, our great task, nor understand it. This is sad, for if there was any way to avoid the spilling of blood we would do so. That, we think, is why we were willing to allow Kree-gan his chance. That and the fact that we had the luxury of time. We still have some time, but we fear his plan has achieved instead this current situation. Tomorrow we will begin to resolve it.”

He nodded. “Yes. Tomorrow. Thank you for speaking to me.” He looked at Morah, who nodded, turned, and walked out without another word. He followed, remembering that the Altavar didn’t stand on protocol.

It took a little while of breathing good air before his stomach would settle down enough to have any sort of conversation. Morah waited patiently for him to recover.

“Well, did you find any surprises in your pet theories?”

He thought a moment. “Yes and no. It depends on just how well that thing translates. I heard the right words, but words can mean different things to different people.”

“Tell me,” the security chief said, “just out of curiosity—and if you can without giving away your own position. Just why do you think that the Altavar are so obsessed with the Diamond?”

“Huh? I assumed it had something to do with reproduction, but if I heard that thing correctly it may not. What did I miss?”

Morah thought his answer over carefully. “Then my guess was correct. You are a good agent, Carroll, and you have the most brilliant deductive mind I have ever encountered, Kreegan included. Do not feel badly. You labor under a handicap impossible to overcome.”

“I knew I missed something—but you still haven’t told me what, yet.”

“I think not. Not at this time. If anything, the true answer would make even the slender hope of settlement impossible. Reproduction is a good theory, and you should stick with it. The Council will understand it, perhaps accept it, and it will do as a basis for negotiations. The true answer, however, they will never accept, for they share your fatal flaw—and mine, too, for I had to be shown to believe.”

He looked at Morah, frowning. “Then at least tell me the flaw.”

“These are aliens, Mr. Carroll. They are, as the old one said, far closer to us than their hideous appearance and smelly hides admit, but they are alien all the same. They were shaped by a history that went vastly different from ours, and they reacted in a way, I suspect, that we could not. It should be obvious that their values, their institutions, their way of looking at things is very different from our own and would require a mind-wrenching adjustment to understand.”

“Do you understand it?”

“Sometimes I think I do, but I cannot really say so truthfully. I know what they are doing, and why they are doing it, but that is not the same thing as understanding it. I think it is time we both turn in, Mr. Carroll. Tomorrow, we settle it, and, in a sense, I fear that the hopes of Kreegan and, in fact, myself, will be dashed. I know those