So I viewed the thing, all the way through. It lasted for a couple of hours. In the first ten minutes I realized there was nothing useful here, but I stayed with it anyway-remember, I got my doctorate in drama and, in spite of everything, I was hooked.
The story took place in a Horch city, time not specified, and the plot was easy enough to follow. It was a kind of a love story. A female Horch and a male Horch wanted to mate, but since they were from the same gens, though not blood relatives, they couldn’t. The various threads of the plot struck me as pretty universal; it was Romeo and Juliet combined with Oedipus Rex and a few snatches of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. The male was a space pilot, the female some kind of a farmer. That didn’t mean she dug seedlings into the mud with her toes. None of these Horch, however ancient in time, had to do much purely physical work. For that sort of thing they had machines. Those were pretty primitive compared to the latest Christmas-tree models, but they were good enough to free the Horch for more intellectual pursuits. Some of the characters in the play were artists, some philosophers, some teachers, some, as far as I could tell, engineers.
I can’t say I followed every detail of the story. There were a lot of references that went right past me, but there are plenty of those in Shakespeare, too. The basic story was clear enough ... except that I kept thinking what a pity it was that I hadn’t had this experience while I was in graduate school. What a hell of a doctoral dissertation I could have written-maybe even one that somebody might actually have wanted to read.
Pirraghiz had gone about her own business while I was watching the bowl. She timed her return perfectly, coming back in just as the story finished, and she wasn’t alone. The male named Mrrranthoghrow was with her. After the two of them had greeted me, she looked at me apologetically. “Was any of that what you wanted to know?”
I came alive. “Not exactly. I was more interested in your field, technology, weapons, that sort of thing.”
“Not weapons,” he protested. “I have no experience with weapons. That is what the warriors and the Horch fighting machines are for.”
“All right then.” I pointed to the viewing bowl. “What makes that thing run?”
He scratched his beard. “Do you mean where the power comes from? There is a small unit in the base, which provides that. It is called a-“ I heard the word he said, but it meant nothing to me.
“Something like a battery?” I guessed. I used the English word, because I didn’t have one in Horch, but when I explained, “A device in which power from another source is stored, and released as needed,” he shook his great head.
“I have never seen the (incomprehensible) charged up, Dannerman. I know nothing of such matters; I am a mechanic, trained in that alone. The power in each machine comes from-“ he searched for a term I might understand, and came up with- “an accumulator, but what it accumulates, and what it accumulates it from, I do not know. Perhaps Djabeertapritch can tell you, if he wants to, but the Others had no reason to instruct me in such matters. When I disassembled and rebuilt the transit machine for the Horch, I knew what components needed to be connected in certain fashions, but I do not understand how it works.”
Suddenly there was a rush of hot blood to my brain. I stared at him. “You worked on the transit machine?”
“With others, yes.”
“And it is in working order?”
“Certainly. The cousin Horch use it all the time-for making copies, such as yourself, and also for tracing channels to other installations of the Others.”
I swallowed, my throat tight. “Strictly as a theoretical question,” I said-I didn’t want to scare him off too soon-“would it be possible for me to use that machine to, say, transmit me back to my planet?”
He looked startled, and so did Pirraghiz. “Oh, Dannerman,” she said sorrowfully, understanding at once what I was getting at.
So did Mrrranthoghrow. His voice was sympathetic as he said, “I am sorry, Dannerman. It is impossible.”
I wasn’t giving up, although my pulse was racing. “Why impossible? The Horch wouldn’t have to know! You could just smuggle me in-“
He was shaking that great, moon-faced head. “I could not do that without their consent, Dannerman,” he said gently. “But that is not the reason. It simply cannot be done. Nothing can be transmitted to any locus unless there is a receiver there, and die receiver in your Starlab has been destroyed.”
PART FIVE
Marooned
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
There was another little period of time there that I’d just as soon forget. The next days passed, but they took a long time doing it. Pirraghiz clucked over me and tried to cheer me up. She proposed entertainments, promised that Beert would soon come back with good news, produced tasty new meals-she did everything she could to cheer me, but I didn’t cheer. I was trying to adjust to the fact that I was marooned in this place for the rest of my life, while my world was going to hell... and there was nothing I could do about it.
I think I was a big frustration to Pirraghiz. She deserved better. She was my maid, valet, cook, and washerwoman and all-day-long companion. Life with her around was like living in a five-star luxury hotel, with my personal Jeeves to care for all my needs. If she had a life of her own, she didn’t let it interfere with her total attendance on me. She washed and mended my ragged clothes. She tended my chamber pot, whisking it away to be sterilized and cleaned before I had to use it again. She fed me about as well as I had ever been fed in my life- found new ways to improve the preserved swill from Starlab and added to it actual fresh vegetables, salads, soups, little cakes dripping with something like fruit-flavored honey. There was even milk. It didn’t come from an actual cow, of course, because there weren’t any of those within many light-years, but it was a sweetish, butterscotch- colored fluid that came, Pirraghiz said, from the females of one of the other captive species.
That startled me. “Don’t they object when you take their milk away from them?”
She wagged her great head reprovingly. “Don’t be foolish, Dannerman. It is not ‘taken.’ It is bartered. They give us things we do not have, and we give them things of ours in return. These females are well repaid for what they
