Strangely enough, that proved useful! For the Jophur abruptly lost their sullen muteness and started babbling. Mostly, their GalTwo and GalFive utterance streams were steeped with fuming anger. But soon the sneaky Niss Machine popped in, making insinuations and smooth-voiced hints.…
Huck turned all four eyestalks to stare at the whirling hologram when it suggested the Jophur might be given this tasty g’Kek, if they cooperated! Soon, mixed among the vengeance vows and retribution exclamatives were bits of useful information, such as the name of their ship and the rank of its Captain-Leader. And one further crucial fact. Although their battlecruiser is a giant compared to outmatched Streaker, the Jophur ship came to Jijo alone.
Huck says she knew all along that the Niss was bluffing about handing her over. In fact, she claimed a triumph, as if it had been her plan all along.
I knew better than to comment on the green sweat coating her eye hoods. After the interview, she needed a bath.
• • •
Unlike the others, I can’t banish all doubt.
Have we chosen the right side?
Oh, there seem to be good reasons for throwing our fate in with these fugitives. Humans are members of the Six, and that makes the dolphins sort of cousins, I guess. And it’s true that Streaker seems more like one of our sooner sneakships than those arrogant dreadnoughts, up in the Rimmer Range. Anyway, I was brought up reading Earthling tall tales. My sentiments are drawn to the underdog.
Still, I must keep at least one mental corner detached and uncommitted. My loyalty lies ultimately with family, sept, and clan … and with the High Sages of the Commons of Jijo.
Among the four of us, someone must remember our true priorities. A time may come when they clash with our hosts’.
How have I kept busy all this time?
For one thing, I’ve been learning to skim the ship’s database, extracting historical summaries of what’s taken place since the Great Printing. The distilled tale is a treat to a born info hound like me.
And yet, I still can’t get that big, mist-shrouded cube out of my mind. Sometimes I hanker to sneak into that cold room and ask questions of the Branch Library — a storehouse so great that the Biblos Archive might as well be a primer for a two-year old.
On our way back from the surface I got to know Rety — the irascible, proud human girl whose illegal tribe of savages would have shaken the Commons with a sensational scandal, in normal times. I also talked to Dwer the Hunter, who I recall visiting Wuphon, a few years back. Dwer chatted about his adventures while Physician Makanee treated his wounds, till he fell into exhausted slumber. Soon Rety collapsed, too, with her little “husband” curled alongside, a slim urrish head draped across her chest.
• • •
For the most part, my job has been to umble.
Yeah, that’s right. To umble for a noor.
My own pet, Huphu, doesn’t know what to make of the newcomer — the one called Mudfoot. On first spying him, she hissed … and he hissed back, exactly like a regular noor. It was such a normal reaction that I started to doubt my own memory. Did I really hear and see Mudfoot talk?
My assigned task is to keep him happy till he decides to talk again.
I guess I owe these people — Gillian Baskin and Tsh’t and the dolphins.
They saved us from the abyss … though maybe we wouldn’t have fallen at all, if it hadn’t been for their interference.
They fixed my broken back … though it was injured when they smashed Wuphon’s Dream.
They turned a mere adventure into an epic … but won’t let us go home for fear we’d tell the tale.
All right, dammit. I’ll umble for the silly noor. He preens and acts starved for sound anyway, after months with just humans for company.
Up close I can sense a difference in him. I used to glimpse the same thing now and then, in the eyes of a few strange noor lounging on the Port Wuphon docks.
A sleek arrogance.
A kind of lazy smugness.
The impression that he’s in on a great joke. One you won’t figure out till there’s egg all over your face.
Ewasx
THE HUMAN CAPTIVES SEEM OBDURATE, MY RINGS, refusing to answer questions. Or else they obfuscate with blatant lies.
• • •
QUERY/INTERROGATIVE:
Is there similarity between their behavior and the way you misled Me?
The way you rings have blurred so many of the waxy memories we coinherited from Asx?
The way our union oscillates between grudging cooperation and intermittent passive resistance?
It is enough to provoke unpleasant questions.
DON’T YOU LIKE BEING PART OF OUR MUCH-IMPROVED SHARED WHOLE? OUR AMBITIOUS ONENESS?
Yes, the majority of you claim gladness to be part of a great Jophur entity, instead of a tepid traeki melange. But can I/we really be sure that you/we love Me/us?
The question is, in itself, a possible symptom of madness. What naturally cojoined Jophur would allow itself to entertain such doubts? The Polkjhy Priest-Stack predicted this hybridization experiment would fail. The priest foretold it would be useless to impose a master torus onto traeki rings already set in their ways.
A metaphor floats upward, along abused trails of half-molten wax.
Are you trying to make a comparison, O second ring-of-cognition?
Ah, yes. I/we see it.
Forging a noble Jophur out of disparate traeki cells might seem like trying to tame a herd of wild beasts. It is an apt analogy.
Too bad the metaphor does nothing to help solve My/ our problem.
WHAT SECRETS LIE BURIED in the melted areas? What memories did the traeki High Sage purposely destroy, during those stressful moments before Asx was converted? I/ we can tell, important evidence once glimmered in those layers that lined our common core. Something Jophur were not meant to know.
But know it we/I shall.
I must!
• • •
SUGGESTION:
Perhaps we can tear information out of these recently seized humans.
The ones bearing the name attributes Lark, Ling, and Rann.
REBUTTAL:
The Priest-Stack vents frustrated steam, upset to learn how little data about Earthlings is contained in our shipboard Library. We have many detailed prescriptions for truth serums or coercion drugs effective against other races and species who are foes of the Great Jophur, but the archives carry no record of any substance that is human-specific. Our Library clearly needs updating, despite the fact that it is a relatively new unit, less than a thousand years old.
One tactician stack, assigned to our shipboard planning staff, proposed that we use interrogation techniques designed against Tymbrimi. Those devil tricksters are close allies of Earthlings, and appear similar in ways that go beyond bipedal locomotion. Trying out that suggestion, we tried projecting psi-compulsion waves at the prisoners, tuned to Tymbrimi empathic frequencies.
