Take up the White Man's burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need;
The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go make them with your living, And mark them with your dead!—Rudyard Kipling
"The White Man's Burden"
"The United States and
the Philippine Islands, 1899"
Knowledge is valuable when charity informs it.
—St. Augustine, City of God
Through the windows they could see the beheaded corpse of Hecate.
A scar gaped along half its length: the gap where Hecate's cabin had been. The rest of the hull had been mounted alongside a silver sausage, one of their captors' ships. It flew three hundred meters distant, keeping pace with their own captor. A slender spine projected aft. The drive flame was a faint violet-white glow running along the spine.
Hecate's severed cabin rode the flank of another such sausage. From inside they could see almost nothing of that: just a silver membrane bulging with fluid, centimeters away, and a rigid cabin forward.
But they saw Hecate's host ship well enough. Freddy had set their remaining telescope to following it. The sausage was banded with color-coded lines and chains of handholds and catwalks, and Moties. The maze ran round Hecate, too. Moties in pressure suits moved over the hull like lice.
They found the lightsail, Freddy's spinnaker. In minutes they had spread several acres of silver film to inflate ahead of the nose.
"That won't add much to the thrust," Jennifer said. "Why . . . ?"
"Why not? It's there," Terry Kakumi said. "Blink and it's a signal device, blink again and it's heat shielding. They do Jove to fiddle."
"It'll heat their cabin some," Freddy said.
Hecate rotted before their eyes. Engineers and tiny Watchmakers stripped away sections of hull and plated them over their own ship. They found automated cameras at nose and tail and amidships, an officially approved model, all identical, which the Moties seemed to find confusing. Hecate's fuel tank they studied and then left intact. They worked inside the cut end until the Engineer was able to pull loose a glass tank festooned with tubing—
"Dammit. That's our sewage recycling system," Freddy said. "We'll starve."
"We have the goodies locker," Jennifer said. "A week's supplies, maybe."
"It's a double time limit. Will the sewage crowd us out before we starve for lack of basic protocarb? Stay tuned."
The men were edgy, talking to distract themselves. But Jennifer was calm, even happy, cradling a six-kilogram alien who clung to her with three arms, watching her face intently, sometimes trying to imitate the sounds she made. And Glenda Ruth . . . was frightened when she thought about it, and frustrated, and uncomfortable; and alive as never before, playing a game she'd begun learning in the cradle.
She worked on Freddy's back, running her thumbs along basic shoulder muscles, probing deep. Freddy subsided with a grunt of unwilling satisfaction. He asked, "Do you suppose they'll keep the data cubes? I've got some good recordings of the battle."
Hecate dwindled. They took half the hull to make a curved mirror to relay light from the light-sail. Kilometers of wiring went into the nose of the captor craft. A small craft arrived from somewhere else; some of the wiring, four cameras, and all of Hecate's little attitude jets went aboard; the Engineer pilot traded places with a replacement, and away it went.
The Moties exposed Hecate's drive; moved it aft; set it to firing. Then they were all over it, tuning, testing. Presently their own drive went off, leaving Hecate's running.
"Something of a compliment," Glenda Ruth said. Freddy nodded.
Jennifer asked, "Does it bother you? Hecate . . ."
Freddy's shoulders set hard. He said, "Not all that much. A racing yacht, we change anything at the slightest excuse. The idea's to win. It's not like"—to Glenda Ruth—"not like your dad losing his battleship, his first command."
"He still flinches if you mention MacArthur." Glenda Ruth resumed trying to soften the knots in Freddy's shoulders.
They could hear the rustling. Engineers and Watchmakers were moving over the surface of their own life bubble. What was happening out there?
"Then again, Hecate is where you and I got together. I do hate—"
"The bed's quite safe."
His tension softened. "We get it back from Balasingham, we can build a ship around it."
The Mediator pup looked into Jennifer's eyes and said, distinctly. "Go eat." Jennifer let go, and the pup pushed off from Jennifer's chest, setting her rotating, sailing unerringly to impact the Engineer.
The cabin was aswarm with Moties. The Warrior would remain in place for minutes at a time, then bound about the cabin like a spider on amphetamines, and presently come to rest again. The Engineer and three skinny half-meter Watchmakers, and a slender creature with a harelip and long, delicate fingers and toes, had reshaped the hole in the cabin wall into an oval airlock. The Engineer had found the safe near the cabin's forward cone, tapped at the code readout, then left it alone. Now the Moties had peeled the cabin walls away and were going through the air and water regeneration systems. From time to time there came a whiff of chemical strangeness.
"Too many of them. They'll strain the air changers," Freddy said.
"I think that one's a doctor," Jennifer said. "Look at the fingers. And the Motie nose is in the roof of the mouth. That thing's got enhanced smell and surgeon's fingers. There was a Doctor caste on Mote Prime."
"Maybe several."
"Right. And between them, the Doctor and the Engineer are going to decide how to keep us alive. I've got to say I don't like that."
Now the three Watchmakers were moving about the cabin drawing green lines. They squeezed the stuff out of what the Navy would have called ration tubes. The patterns weren't complex enough to be writing. The Watchmakers covered the walls with lines and curves, and presently converged where the sewage recycling system had been.
Freddy asked, "Why not, Jennifer? The way you and Glenda Ruth talk, these Moties can do anything, including keep humans healthy."
"But it's all very basic, isn't it? Nothing like the castle they built for us on Mote Prime."
"It's a battle fleet, not a city," Glenda Ruth said.
Terry Kakumi snapped, "It's a poor little pathetic battle fleet. Look at them, Jennie. Tiny little ships, mostly tank, big cabins because there are too many of the buggers, motors that do a meter per sec squared at best. What's left for weapons? Are they supposed to make them on the spot?
"What would a real fleet be like, Jennie? Rape my lizard, what couldn't we build with Motie Engineers at the Yards? They're church-rat poor. We've been captured by BuReloc transportees! They're stripping our car and fixing our life support with borrowed chewing gum and string!"
Jennifer giggled. "Bag ladies with borrowed chewing gum. I love it!"
Glenda Ruth felt herself bristling, as if these were her Moties. But she could feel it: Terry was right. "What can we do?"
"Talk to them, Glenda Ruth. Tell them we're worth the price of their last coin," Terry said. "Tell them to pull the pea out from all those mattresses, I'm just a pathetic mass of bruises. Explain ransom to them. Or they'll let us strangle."
She said, "These don't talk. We'll have to wait."
The new East India Mediator was old, as old as Eudoxus, with gray streaks at the muzzle and along the flanks. She was escorted into the chamber by a Warrior and a younger Mediator, who both left quickly.
When she was presented to Horace Bury, the trader flinched. Chris Blaine moved closer and saw what the Motie was carrying. "A newborn?" he asked, and watched Bury relax. Of course Bury took it for a Watchmaker.
The aged Mediator examined the humans and turned toward Bury radiating delighted surprise. "Excellency! I had never dared hope to meet you in person, even when it became known that you were again in the Mote system. I have thought long on the name I would give myself and have chosen Omar rather than something more pretentious. It is my greatest pleasure finally to meet you."
Bury bowed slightly. "I am pleased to have had such apt students."
"And my new apprentice. We have not chosen a name, but—"
"You presume," Eudoxus said. "We too have new apprentices, and we are eager to introduce them to His Excellency."
"Of course." Omar turned to Wordsworth and began to speak.
"Hracht!" Eudoxus looked pleased. "We agreed that all conversation will be in Anglic. This means yours as well, does it not?"
Wordsworth was about to speak, but some gesture from Omar silenced her. "I would prefer rigid rules to no rules," Omar said. "Very well, I will receive my information for all to hear. Where do matters stand now?"
"Not good not bad," Wordsworth said. "We make progress, agree that East India will have honored place, second to Medina but only to Medina."
The Mediator pup was staring intently at Horace Bury. The trader was not annoyed. Interesting . . .
"Progress indeed," Omar said. "And how will all this be accomplished?"
Chris Blaine smiled thinly. "Not all details have been resolved," he said. "Yet we can agree, there has never been a better time to unite all Moties. Mote Prime is not a factor. The Empire has many ships. With Medina and East India, and allies you may bring . . ."
Omar moved closer to Bury. The Mediator pup stretched toward him. Absently Bury's hand reached out, touched the pup's fur, drew back.
"Excellency," Omar said. "Let us speak seriously. Medina and East India are powerful if united, yet it must be obvious to all that even united we are not the greatest power among the space dwellers."
"King Peter wasn't the most powerful Master on Mote Prime," Chris Blaine said.
Bury spoke softly. "Medina and East India were the first to understand the implications of the protostar. Your ships even now negotiate with the Empire. Why should you not have the rewards of prescience?" He deliberately scratched behind the pup's oversize ear. "May I choose a name? Ali Baba, I think." Bury smiled. "Of course there is a small favor we require."
Eudoxus said, "We have begun to speak with the Crimean Tartars. It goes slowly. They know only obsolete languages."
"Obsolete to you," Omar said. "Not to us. One of my sisters has spoken with the Tartars, and I received word moments before I landed here. Excellency, the Tartars are afraid. They find that every Motie's hand is against them, and they do not know what they have. Only that it is important, and holding it is dangerous."
"They're holding a wolf by the ears," Joyce said.
The hull clonked.
In Hecate's cabin, they waited.
A Warrior bounded through the new air lock, scuttled about the cabin, and presently settled. It exchanged words with the Warrior already present. It emitted a warbling whistle.
Other Moties entered: a Master, a meter and a half tall and clad in thick white fur, and a smaller Motie furred in a dense brown-and-white pattern: a Mediator.
"We're in business," Glenda Ruth said.
Two Engineers followed, towing a glass cylinder with green goo sloshing in it: Hecate's sewage recycler. Six-fingered hands had been at work on it, but it didn't seem greatly changed.
"Another compliment," Freddy said. "Given what that cost me, I'd have been surprised if they could make it much more efficient."
Glenda Ruth felt Freddy's relief; she even shared it. Their life spans had just been extended by several weeks. More important was the timing.
"We thank for glorious gift," she said in the language Jock and Charlie had taught her, King Peter's language, from Mote Prime.
The Mediator's stance indicated receptivity but no understanding.
Damn! But free-fall might alter a Motie's body language. (Stance, indeed!) Or her words might be wrong, or her own gestures. How would a crippled Mediator speak, one with a missing arm?
Two of those little Moties with the Engineers weren't Watchmakers; they were Mediator pups. Jennifer waved. The larger pup jumped across ten meters of space, impacted, and clung. Jennifer wasn't having trouble communicating.
Okay. Glenda Ruth released her seat belts to give her body full play, worked her foot under a strap for anchorage, and said, palms facing out, regal-but-unarmed. "Our lives much improved by generous—"
The Moties converged on her.
Glenda Ruth had to remember to resume breathing. She was very aware of the spiky Warriors. They shifted constantly to keep a free path between prisoners and weapons. The four humans held quite still as six-fingered hands moved over them.
They had guessed this might happen. Glenda Ruth's mother, the only woman aboard MacArthur, had stripped so that Moties could learn something of human anatomy. Jennifer wanted that slot for herself.
It didn't matter. The caste that Jennifer thought was a Doctor moved in with the Engineer, and they peeled Hecate's crew like bananas. The humans had to help in self-defense. The Doctor shied back from waves of alien pheromones, then sniffed dutifully. It had been many hours since there was a shower aboard Hecate.
Jennifer blushed and twitched at tickle points. Freddy thought it was funny and was trying to hide it. Terry's rounded nudity didn't bother him, but his hyperawareness of the Warriors' guns was driving Glenda Ruth nuts. She tried not to flinch at the touch of Motie hands. Dry. Hard. Right hands felt like a dozen twigs gliding over her face, seeking the muscles that make the front of a human head into a signaling system. The left hand clamped like a vise to hold her arm or leg or torso to be probed.
They turned and twisted for the Doctor. The Mediator and Master hung back, watching.
Human vertebrae fascinated them, as they had thirty years before, when MacArthur's crew met Moties from Mote Prime. Evolution had not taken that path on the Mote. Motie life-forms had spines of solid bone and heavy, complex joints.
The brown-and-white pup jumped from human to human, sniffing, feeling, comparing. Even the Master, judging it safe, moved forward to run its right hands along Glenda Ruth's spine. Jennifer collapsed in giggling that was half sobs, sandbagged by everyone's favorite memory from Summer Vacation.
(Outside the museum on Mote Prime, a Master's dozen fingers explored Kevin Renner's back. Renner shifted in delight. "Right! A little lower. Okay, scratch right there. Ahh!")
They couldn't talk under such circumstances. Glenda Ruth tried. They had to educate the Mediator, give it words to learn . . . but the others' embarrassment was just too strong. Glenda Ruth quickly gave up.
The Doctor and Engineer began talking to the Master. Pointing, demonstrating, explaining. The white-furred Motie took it all in. It asked short questions (that one inflection, query, brought verbal responses, where another, command, caused action), and the Mo-ties resumed their examination. One question sent the Engineer to join its Watchmakers at work in the air recycler. Another had it comparing Freddy and Terry, Jennifer and Glenda Ruth. Hands. Hair. Toes. Spines again. Genitals (will you stop that giggling?)
The Mediator watched.
And finally they were allowed, to put their clothes on. They found it hard to look at each other. The Master and its attendants were still talking.
"We should have guessed," Glenda Ruth said. "Masters do talk. It's different from the Mediator skill. They have to organize data from a dozen different castes . . . professions."
Clothed, it was all right to speak again. Jennifer said, "I think the Doctor's nearsighted. In a surgeon that's probably good."
The adult Mediator took the second Mediator pup from its Engineer parent. She crossed to the bridge, caught herself, and offered the little Motie to Freddy: clearly an offer, not a demand.
Freddy looked at Glenda Ruth. He was showing surprise, no distaste, and a touch of hope. She said, "Take it." Why Freddy? Freddy immediately reached out, smiling, and accepted the thing into his arms.
Why Freddy? Why not me?
It clung with five limbs, its hands exploring Freddy's head and shoulders, where his skin was exposed. Presently it pulled back to watch his face. Moties caught on to that one quick, the notion of a mobile face. Why not me, or Terry?
The Master spoke. The Engineer led the Mediator to the safe door. The Mediator began playing with the code readout.
"Damn," Glenda Ruth said. The others looked at her.
If she let the others know exactly what she had in mind, a Mediator would know it now or later. Could she get some help on this? She pointed at the safe and shouted, "Show signs of distress, dammit! It's too soon!"
Distress, right. Freddy spasmed, pointed to the safe with an out-flung arm, and flung the other across his averted eyes, crying, "Weep! Wail!" Glenda Ruth choked back a laugh. The pup was trying to imitate him, right arms pointing, left across its eyes.
Terry's hand closed on her ankle. "The Warriors."
"They—" She looked. They would. "Freddy love, cut it."
"What was that about?"
She shook her head. "Anyway, you made the point."
One of the Warriors scuttled forward and anchored itself next to the safe, gun pointed back toward the humans.
The safe door slid open. A Watchmaker scuttled in. It handed out a laboratory sealed-environment jar as large as itself, then a plastic jar of dark powder, a stack of documents, a roll of gold coins.
The Engineer examined the gold and said something to the Master. The Master answered.
The Engineer put the papers back, and the cocoa. It examined the jar.
"Don't touch that!" Glenda Ruth shouted. No Motie would understand, but the Mediator would remember.
The Engineer opened the seals.
There was a pop. The Warrior's head snapped around to catch the same puff of gas that caught the Engineer. Glenda Ruth wondered if they would be shot.
The Warriors didn't shoot. The Engineer took a scraping from the sludge in the jar, then resealed it and put it back. It left the door open. It spoke a word and tossed the gold at one of the Watchmakers, who caught it and jumped through the new airlock.
The other Engineers had reattached the sewage recyling system where six lines of graffiti-green met in a sunburst. They continued to work on it, add a pipe here, bend, constrict. The Warriors maintained their stations. When Glenda Ruth kicked herself forward to the safe, she could feel phantom bullets. The Warriors came alert; the Master gave no signal that she could recognize; but no Motie stopped her.
Thanks to the Moties' parsimonious lowering of cabin pressure, the canister's pressure had sprayed perhaps 10 percent of the encysted eggs of the Crazy Eddie Worm into the cabin as an aerosol. Most of the contents were intact. There was a mild odor of petroleum and other pollutants, the natural state of water on Mote Prime, fading rapidly as the air filters did their work. The Moties clearly didn't like the smell any more than the humans did. It wouldn't have bothered planet-dwelling Moties.
They've evolved in space, Glenda Ruth thought. Space-dwelling Moties who don't detest pollution will die of it.
Glenda Ruth carefully wiped the rim and resealed the canister, and glared at the Engineer. It might be vital to be able to claim that the Moties had been infected by accident.
Then she suppressed a shudder: a hundred wormlets would hatch and die in her lungs.
Thirty years before, Whitbread's asteroid-mining Engineer had been infected with the parasitic worm. MacArthur's biologists determined that it couldn't infect humans and labeled it Form Zeta, the sixth living thing they'd found during autopsy on the Engineer. Present, not in large numbers, but present.
Jock and Charlie and Ivan carried it in greater numbers, and they didn't care any more than humans care about E. coli. Parasite Zeta did no harm beyond consuming a few calories; which was why the Blaine Institute biologists had used it as the base for their genetic engineering experiments.
It would be interesting to know if the parasite was normal among these space-evolved Moties. Not that it mattered: surely it would live, and this worm was different. And it would not survive in human lungs, but just the thought—
The Mediator spoke at her shoulder, and she jumped. It said, "Mediators talk. No Horace Bury Fyunch(click), but we talk."
"Good," said Glenda Ruth. "Let's talk. Please leave our trade goods alone. This is all we have to bargain with. It should not be ruined."
And now the Crazy Eddie Worm was growing in an Engineer, a female. Had the Warrior been female, too? Would it affect these Watchmakers?
How many Masters were aboard? Too many, of course, more
than their captors would actually want, but . . . three? Four? And
the clock was counting down.
"Your Lordship's presence is requested," the voice said. "My Lord. My Lord, I must insist. Rod Blaine, wake up, dammit!"
Rod sat bolt upright. "All right, already."
"What is it?" Sally asked. She sat up with a look of concern. "The children . . ."
Rod spoke to the ceiling. "Who?"
"Lord Orkovsky. He says the situation is urgent," the telephone said.
Rod Blaine swung his feet over the edge of the bed and found his slippers. "I'll talk to him in the study. Send coffee." He turned to Sally. "Not the kids. The Foreign Secretary wouldn't call us in the middle of the night about that." He went across the hall to his study and sat at his desk. "I'm here. No visuals. All right, Roger, what's up?"
"The Moties are loose."
"How?"
"Actually, it's not quite that bad." Lord Roger Orkovsky, Secretary of State for External Affairs, sounded like a diplomat under stress. "You'll recall there was some question of when Dr. Buck-man's protostar would collapse."
"Yes, yes, of course."
"Well, it's happened, and the Moties were ready for it. Due to some clever thinking—Chris is mentioned in the dispatches—Mercer had sent everything he could scrape up out to where the new Alderson point would form, so we were ready, too. Almost ready.
"Details later. We got a whole bunch of reports at once, about stellar geometry and such. You'll have to read them all. What's important is that there are some Motie ships with an ambassador on board cooling their heels under Navy detention while we decide what to do about them. And Mercer wants a battle fleet."
Rod was aware that Sally had come up behind him. "Roger," she said.
"Good morning, Sally. Sorry to yank you up like this—"
"Are the children all right?"
"I was just getting to that," Orkovsky said. "We don't know. Chris volunteered to be Navy liaison aboard Bury's ship—Sinbad. Commodore Kevin Renner commanding."
"Commodore."
"Yeah, that's complicated, too."
"So they went into the Mote system," Rod said.
"Right. Sinbad, a light cruiser—Atropos, Commander Rawlins— and a Motie ship. The reports say the first person the Moties wanted to talk to was Horace Bury."
"Roger, that doesn't make sense," Sally said.
"Maybe not, but it's true. Look, I better give you the rest of this. There'll be a cabinet meeting in the Palace in two hours. We want you there. Both of you. Matter of fact, we want you back on the Motie Commission. You were going back to New Caledonia anyway, now the government will pay for getting you there. The Navy will have a ship ready by the time you get to the Palace."
"We can't leave so soon!" Rod said.
"Yes, we can," Sally said. "Roger, thanks. You mentioned Chris. What about Glenda Ruth?"
"That was the last message in the stack," Orkovsky said. "Sally, a hundred hours after Sinbad went into the Mote system, Freddy Townsend took his yacht through. Glenda Ruth was aboard."
"I want his name," Sally said.
"Huh?"
"Whoever let them through. There's got to be a Navy man in charge out there, and he let our daughter go into the Mote system in an unarmed yacht. I want his name."
"Sally . . ."
"Yes, I know, he thought he had a good reason."
"Maybe he did."
"It wouldn't matter, would it? When was the last time you won an argument with her? I still want his name. Fyunch(click)!"
"Yes, madame?"
"Is our car ready?"
"Yes, madame."
"Tell Wilson we'll be leaving in an hour. Get clearances for the west entrance to the Palace."
"Yes, madame."
"So what do we take?" Sally said. "Jock. Fyunch(click), we want to talk to Jock. Wake him up, but check with the doctors first."
"Good thinking," Rod said. "Sally, we can't take him with us."
"No, but we can get him to record something to prove he's still alive," Sally said.
"What?" Rod held a sheath of facsimile papers. "The last report says, and I quote: The Hon. Glenda Ruth Blaine, on the basis of brief conversations with the Motie representatives, has concluded that although these Moties know Anglic and have some familiarity with the Empire, they are not part of any Motie group previously encountered! I don't think they believe her."
"More fools they."
"Madame," the ceiling said. "Jock has been awakened. Do you want visuals?"
"Yes, thank you."
Brown and white fur streaked with gray. "Good morning, Sally. If you don't mind, I'll have chocolate while we talk."
"By all means. Good morning. Jock, the Moties are loose."
"Ah?"
"You knew about the protostar."
"I know what you have told me about the protostar. You said that it would collapse within the next hundred years. I take it that was wrong? That it has already happened?"
"You got it," Rod said. "Jock, we have a problem. Moties that Glenda Ruth believes aren't part of King Peter's group have got out of the Mote system. So far they appear to be stuck in a red dwarf backwater, but we all know the Empire can't keep up two blockades."
"And you and Sally have been given the problem of what to do about the Moties," Jock said. "Have they made you an admiral yet?"
"No."
"They will. And they'll give you a fleet." Jock's hand moved expressively. "At least it's not Kutuzov. Of course they want you to leave immediately. I am afraid I cannot accompany you."
"No, the Jump shock would kill you."
"Are the children well? They must have involved themselves by now."
Sally said, "They've gone to the Mote."
"I did not think you could surprise me," Jock said, "But you have. I see. Give me an hour. I will make what records I can."
"In what language?" Rod asked.
"In several. I will need recent pictures of Chris and Glenda Ruth, as well as of myself."
"We have a meeting."
"Of course. We will discuss this when you're done with that." The Motie paused, and somehow the Motie smile was a grin of triumph. "So the horse learned to sing after all."
"I hadn't expected this," Jennifer said. "We're infested with Mo-ties! Freddy . . . Freddy, I can't keep thinking of this ship as Hecate!"
Freddy Townsend looked around. "Yeah. Hecate's cabin mounted on a ship of unknown name. Bandit-One? And we'll just hang numbers on the rest of the fleet."
Glenda Ruth said, "We could ask—"
And she shied back before he snarled, "I won't ask Victoria. She'd give us the name of this Motie ship, like we're strap-on cargo."
Jennifer said, "A two-headed ship. Two captains. We've never seen the Master that gives the orders. Cerberus?"
Five Watchmakers, two Warriors, three Engineers nursing two Mediator pups, the old Mediator they now called Victoria, a Master, a Doctor, and a lean, spidery variant that scuttled back and forth through Cerberus's big new airlock, perhaps bearing messages, had all made their nests in the cabin.
The change had come gradually, while they slept. Glenda Ruth remembered waking from time to time in a shifting pattern of variously shaped Moties. Twelve hours of that, then she woke choking and weeping. The Doctor had examined them and then meeped at the young male Master they'd named Merlin, who warbled at the engineers, who readjusted the air and sewage recyclers until the air was back to standard . . . but it was still thick with Motie smells, and every human's eyes were still red.
The green strips painted along the walls had grown into vines, furry green tubes as thick Glenda Ruth's leg. The various Moties used the lines to mark off their territories.
They'd turned Cerberus's original airlock into a toilet: one toilet with a variety of attachments. The Engineers had worked on Cerberus's original toilet, too. It worked better now.
"They've put screens up. Both toilets," Glenda Ruth said. "We're talking now."
"Can you tell them to leave us some room?"
"I'll give it another try, but you can guess the answer. This much is more personal room than they've ever seen in one spot."
An Engineer arrived with food. All of the Moties converged except one Warrior. Glenda Ruth said, "Jennifer, go and see what they're eating."
The meal was democratic: the young Master called Merlin supervised distribution and sent a Watchmaker with food for the Warrior on guard. Merlin looked around when Jennifer came near. Victoria said he was a young male; this was not obvious, given he was helping to nurse the Mediator pups. The human presence didn't disturb him. Jennifer looked about her; spoke a few words to Victoria.
The Mediator swam to join Glenda Ruth. Victoria had been learning Anglic much faster than Glenda Ruth could learn Oort Cloud Recent.
She said, "About food? I think, thought you have your own."
"I'd like to know if this is like what we eat," she told it.
"Will ask Doctor and Engineer."
"I would like to feed you cocoa."
"Why?"
"On the planet they liked cocoa. If you like cocoa, we have something to trade."
"You said, what is in safebox is trade goods. We should not take without giving. Cocoa in safe?"
"Yes."
Victoria brought her flat face close. "Trade space with us! Past the starhole is all the worlds, all within your gripping hand. Give us the worlds, take what you want. Take tools you see, tell tools you want, Engineers make that. Take any caste of us, tell what shape and kind you want, you wait, your children will have."
Glenda Ruth said, "This is not so simple. We know how your numbers grow."
Stillness.
"We think we have an answer, but it's still not easy. Many Motie families will need to work together. As Moties do not always do."
"Glenda Ruth, who is Crazy Eddie you speak of?"
Glenda Ruth was only surprised for a moment. "Planet-dwelling Moties told us about Crazy Eddie. Maybe you know him with another name."
"Maybe."
"Crazy Eddie isn't one person, he is a kind of person. The kind who . . . who tries to stop change when change is too massive to stop."
"We tell children about Sfufth, who throws away garbage because it smells bad."
"Something like that." Sfufth? Shifufsth? She couldn't quite make that sound.
Jennifer had rejoined them, and now she carried the older pup. She said, "We had a very powerful Master, long ago. Joseph Stalin had the power of life and death over all of his people, in hundreds of millions." Jennifer glanced at Glenda Ruth: stop or go? Uncertain, Glenda Ruth nodded.
Jennifer went on, "Advisers told Stalin that there was a shortage of copper tube in his domain. Stalin gave his orders. Everywhere across a tenth of the land area of our world, what was made of copper was melted down to make tubes. Communication lines disappeared. Tractor parts, other tools. Wherever copper was needed, it was made pipes instead."
"Sfufth. We know him," Victoria said. "Sfufth is found everywhere, in every caste. Sfufth breeds Watchmakers for sale to other nests. No need for cage, they take care of selves."
Jennifer was delighted. "Yes! There's a painting in a museum on Mote Prime." She was about to convey an unfortunate nuance, and Glenda Ruth couldn't stop her. "A burning city. Starving Mo-ties in riot. A Mediator stands on a car to be seen and heard and shouts, 'Return to your tasks!" "
Victoria nodded head and shoulders. "When possibilities close, Crazy Eddie doesn't see."
Glenda Ruth said, "In Stalin's domain, fifty years after. Things changed. More communication, better tools and transport. Their Warriors ate half their resources for all that long time, but the weapons they made were second best. Lesser domains began splitting off. Some older Masters acted to take charge of the domain and turn it all back. The Gang of Crazy Eddies."
Had she got her point across? Years of watching Jock and Charlie weren't helping enough. Too much of Mediator body language was conscious; was arbitrary. She said, "When possibilities open, Crazy Eddie doesn't see."
The Mediator thought that over. She said. "Make cocoa to look at first. For safety."
For poison, she meant.
So Freddy made cocoa for the four of them—"Make it hot," Glenda Ruth whispered—and an extra bulbful for analysis.
"Too hot," Victoria said when she touched it. She gave it to the Engineer, who carried it into the hidden part of Cerberus. The human crew huddled with their heads together, sipping, their shoulders shutting out the aliens around them. Freddy had a crime drama running on a monitor; Victoria might have been watching it, and Merlin watched intermittently, but no human was.
"How are you doing?" Freddy asked.
Glenda Ruth said, "I'm dancing as fast as I can, but the pace is too damned slow. Jennifer, what were they eating?"
Jennifer was running her hand along the pup's back as if it were a cat; but her hand kept stopping to feel the weird geometry. She said, "Just one dish. A gray crust around gray-green paste that looked a lot like basic protocarb."
"Jen, did it steam? Was it hot?"
"It wasn't hot. What do you want to know?"
She dared not tell them too much, but she had to know this. "Do they cook?"
"Glenda Ruth, the air coming through the new lock is warmer than it is here, but there's no smell of cooking."
"Okay." She looked at the faces around her. Open, honest faces shadowed by every passing thought. Did they understand, would they reveal, too much?
Engineer and Warrior were certainly infected. The worm eggs might well infect every Motie form in Cerberus's cabin. If that didn't reach a Master, then an Engineer might have passed it on by now. But if a Mediator wasn't infected soon . . . there wouldn't be anything to talk about. Just a Master turned sterile male, and other forms showing the same symptoms, and the blame very clear.