Grego took a pull at his drink. “You’ve figured it all out, haven’t you?”
She smiled a tight little smile and nodded.
Grego nodded. “I’ll speak to Pappy Jack at the reception.”
Chapter Forty-Six
When Fuzzies talk among themselves, they generally sit down on the ground—or the floor—in a circle and proceed with the conversation. When they are in attendance at a social function with the Hagga, though, they have learned to make their talk-circle in a place where they are not apt to get stepped on accidentally. In the case of parties held in places with outdoor terraces, such as Victor Grego’s penthouse or the Colonial Governor’s quarters at Government House, there always seemed to be heavy circular tables made of dilon in use as outdoor furniture. These became a favorite place for Fuzzy-talk while the Hagga made Big-One talk.
Starwatcher and Little Fuzzy were deep in serious conversation with Diamond, who would occasionally nod his head slowly. All of them frequently lapsed into Lingua Fuzzy, audible to Terran ears only as a series of yeeks. All three were soon to be disturbed by Commodore Napier—who referred to them as the Big Three Fuzzies—as he would require their presence in the Governor’s conference room.
The reception that Alex Napier had laid on at Government House could, as Christiana had predicted, be accurately described as having a certain amount of pomp. The first inkling that this was a military affair came from the posted—and armed—Marine sentries in dress blues. They positively glittered. They were affable, incredibly polite to the civilians, and all business as they checked the identification of every person entering the building.
Through Governor Rainsford’s cavernous private conference room and out on the terrace, Navy messcooks in spotless whites had laid out a buffet that would rival the most elaborate do that Jerry Panoyian could assemble. The bar was open, but the presence of more Marine sentries, posted like statues around the terrace fenceline, seemed to indicate restraint. Napier had carefully orchestrated the affair to indicate convivial cooperation while at the same time underscoring the point that civil unrest was still a cause for concern. He had only invited The People Who Counted, and the quick realization that they were all there indicated that this would come to more than some little Public Relations party the Navy was tossing.
Ordinarily, Napier would have been resplendent in his gold-braided Space Navy black uniform, but he looked like an undertaker alongside Marines in dress blues. Phil Helton, in particular, was blindingly easy to find, with Master Gunnery Sergeant of Fleet Marines chevrons—three gold ones up, three more upside down under them, and two straight gold bars through the middle, all on a crimson background with a flaming bomb at the center of the two straight bars. That took up most of each sleeve, but on the left one he had to cram in a string of gold hashmarks and off-planet service bars (which were called hershey bars for some reason no one remembered any more). The high, tunic collar, piped in red, was set off with the TFMC anchor-and-spiral-nebula insignia—“clanker in the stars,” as it was referred to by insiders.
Jack Holloway sidled up to Helton. “That’s a mighty gaudy—I mean—ah—colorful uniform, Phil,” he said.
Helton smiled a tight smile and took a sip of his drink. “That’s because you’ve never seen a senior Marine NCO in full drag before,” he said.
“Full drag?” Holloway was awash to the term.
“All dressed up,” Helton said.
“No,” Jack said, “as a matter of fact, I never have. Great Ghu,” he said, eyeing Helton’s medals, “that’s quite a string of gongs you’ve got there, too.”
“Well,” Helton said, “no matter how careful you are, you can’t avoid collecting a few in twenty years.”
“What’s your next move?” Holloway asked. “I suppose you’ll be shipping out pretty soon.”
“Yes, sir,” Helton said, reiterating their private joke. “My work’s done here, now. Time to move on to the next job.”
“How long before they put you out to pasture?” Jack asked.
Helton puffed his cheeks and exhaled noisily. “I’m supposed to get my double-dec chip any time, now,” he said. “I haven’t made up my mind whether to pull the pin then or stick for thirty. It all just gets to be the same after a while.”
Holloway looked off into the middle distance. “I know what you mean, Phil,” he said. “I know what you mean.”
The band—in Navy full-dress—had returned to the platform and struck up a slow waltz called Baldur’s Rum Rats. Holloway recognized it, but had no notion at all of why it had come to be written or what it meant.
As Holloway stared across the terrace, he could see Grego and Christiana coming toward them, accompanied by Ben Rainsford—who was wearing his usual rumpled bush jacket and short pants. With his bushy red whiskers and knobby knees—at that distance—he looked rather like an obscure species of khaki emu. Odd—how he and Victor Grego had become something of friendly enemies, once each understood that they were both working toward the same goals. Grego seemed to be getting positively mellow—and everyone noticed how impossible it was for himself and Christiana to conceal their obviously deep devotion to each other. Even in public, at the most formal of affairs, they were like a pair of water spaniels that had mated for life—totally wrapped up in each other.
Holloway smiled as unobtrusively as he could. Wonder what goes on when there’s no one else around, he thought. Looks like there’ll be another wedding reception pretty soon—and Grego won’t be losing his Fuzzy-Sitter-In-Chief at this one.
He turned to Helton. “I hope you’ll consider coming back to Zarathustra when you leave the TFMC,” he said.
“I heard that,” Grego said jovially, “and I concur. Zarathustra needs men like you, Helton. We’re getting ready to grow, again. This little pot of mud that Ingermann has stirred up will settle out pretty soon, and—”
“And Ian Ferguson is griping about retirement,” Rainsford interrupted. “I’ve been talking to Alex Napier about you, young man, and he agrees with me that you’d be a perfect choice for the next Commandant of the Colonial Constabulary.”
Helton grinned broadly and took a hurried gulp of his drink. “You overwhelm me, gentlemen,” he said. The only thing I can say at the moment is a verse that comes to mind.
‘When foxes eat the last gold grape,
And the last white antelope is killed,
I shall stop fighting and escape
Into a little house I’ll build.’”
Helton was relieved from dealing further with Ben Rainsford’s expansive suggestions by the ringing of a ship’s bell over the portable public address speakers—ding-ding—ding-ding—and the amplified voice of a Navy Chief Petty Officer. “Four bells and all’s shipshape. Those with individual invitations to the briefing should turn to in the ward room—” pause”—I mean—assemble in the Governor’s conference chamber.”
1800 hours. The band resumed playing, softly—light classics, mostly: Like Loki is my Home, Buried in the Stars, Hyper space Heaven, Senchant Star—that sort of thing. People were filing into the conference room and taking seats which had small cards taped to the backs with each individual’s name printed on them.
The room had been re-arranged, with the long conference table turned at a right angle across one end of the room. Alex Napier and his principal staff were seated behind it, like judges in a court.
As soon as everyone was comfortably situated and the Marine guards had closed the outer doors to the conference room, Napier rose. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, nodding toward Little Fuzzy, Diamond, and Starwatcher, who were seated in the front row, to indicate that he included them in the appellation, “you may have noticed that there are quite a lot of Marines on Zarathustra.” There was a ripple of laughter. “To be more precise,” Napier said, “there is a full brigade of them, assigned to Xerxes Base and under the command of Colonel Thomas McGraw.” He indicated McGraw, who stood so that everyone might get a good look at him. “I wish to emphasize,
“Napier continued, “that this military presence in no way indicates that I have again assumed temporary control of the civil government. The Marines—and a contingent of Naval personnel from Xerxes—are here in answer to the specific request by Governor Rainsford for assistance in maintaining law and order during a period of civil unrest. When complete order has been restored, and on the request, again, of Governor Rainsford, we will withdraw.”
Jack Holloway nodded. Ah, he thought to himself, Ben has made a deal with Alex Napier—a deal that will not bring down a Board of Inquiry on either one of them, but will get us all out from under this insurrection business as gracefully as possible.
“The situation is, I must say, quite serious,” Napier was saying, “but nothing—in the view of Governor Rainsford, Mr. Victor Grego, or myself—that warrants a declaration of Martial Law.”
Oh-ho, Holloway was thinking. All three of them put it together over cocktails last night.
“I will elaborate on this later during the briefing, but it is not the central reason for calling you together.”
“As most of you know, there has been discovered—in conjunction with a wrecked hypership of alien design—a certain body of equally alien communications and information storage gear on North Beta. The Navy has impounded this gear under the provisions of Priority One, in order to examine it and decipher as much of the information as our cryptography and psycho-medical personnel could manage. The results of our investigations will be presented in the briefing by Lieutenant Commander Ybarra, Liaison Officer, and Lieutenant diCenzo, Chief Psychologist—whose portion of the briefing will follow immediately after me. Gentlemen…” Napier sat.
Ybarra stood, and Joe diCenzo moved to the projection console.
Pancho Ybarra made the protocol-appropriate prefatory remarks, and began his portion of the briefing. “Basically.” he said, “the problem is divided into three parts. First, we had to decipher the Fuzzy language as completely as possible. Working from the vocabulary we accumulated when doing our sapience tests, and from basic number identification, we were able, using computers, to compile a lexicographical profile of Actual Fuzzy from the keys found in Zarathustran Fuzzy. Secondly, we took phonetics and mated them with sounds to decipher the Fuzzy alphabet. Finally, we continually played side systems in and out of the data present in order to catch the subtleties of nuance and idiom. As a result of this program, we have assembled what we believe to he a fairly clear picture of the history of Fuzzies on Zarathustra.”
Slide projections and film strips played across the readout screen, underscoring the technical remarks to which Commander Ybarra referred.
“I won’t bore you,” Pancho Ybarra said, “with technical details, although I will be available later to answer specific questions by qualified researchers.”
“To place the matter in a simple narrative form, the events are as follows. Very nearly a thousand years ago, a hyper-drive spaceship was wrecked on the northern part of Beta Continent. The passengers and crew were all Fuzzies. Fuzzies were at that time—and if they have survived on what we will call Fuzzyhome planet, still are—a star-traveling race of intelligent beings. They are, we suspect, more intelligent than Terran Humans, but we are not yet certain of that point.”
“In any case, the cracked-up ship came to rest about halfway up Mount Fuzzy in Fuzzy Valley. Some were killed, but most of the Fuzzies survived.”
“We don’t know where Fuzzyhome is, because no navigational equipment survived the crash, and, as nearly as we can tell the vessel was off course when it crashed—or made its forced landing. In any case, there was some trouble with the drives. The vessel sent out a distress call, and that is logged, but no other Fuzzy vessel ever found them, so the position given must have been wrong.”
“At any rate, the surviving Fuzzies were stuck in Fuzzy Valley and on Mount Fuzzy. However, there was a nice cave in the mountain. Geothermal heat kept it warm and it is lighted all the time; the same geothermal heat excites sunstones to thermofluorescence, and the entire interior of the cave is liberally studded with sunstones. I can explain the geology of this phenomenon, but I shan’t go into it deeply unless there are specific questions later. Basically, North Beta and South Beta were once separate continents. As the tectonic plates drifted together, they raised up the mountain range to which Mount Fuzzy belongs. The flint layer was on top of a limestone layer; ground water leached away the limestone, over some megacenturies, leaving the cavern roof and its layer of sunstones exposed.”
“It was a very nice cave.”
“The shipwrecked Fuzzies took as much gear as they could from the ship into the cave, to help them survive. They set up housekeeping for a few generations. They lived from the surrounding countryside, eating what they could catch, and augmenting that with stores salvaged from the ship. They built some huts and suchlike, but mainly they headquartered in this fine cave.”
Jack Holloway hadn’t heard any of this before. He wasn’t upset about being left out, because while this wonderful little social gathering was being put together, he had been very busy in the hospital getting his arm put back together.
Ybarra continued. “The ship—as nearly as we can tell— was a cargo-passenger vessel with a crew we would call paramilitary. This is not an accurate term, because Fuzzies don’t think in military terms the same way that Terran Humans do. The crew, though, was trained to teamwork, whereas the passengers were not.”
“At first, the castaways didn’t care too much for the lush plants that grew in Fuzzy Valley, but as time went by, they began to taste better and better. The titanium hull of the ship was slowly being eroded away by ground water, which oxidized it and leached titanium salts down into the soil of the valley, where the native plants picked the stuff up.”
“Even after all the ship’s stores were gone, there was still an abundant supply of a spice shipment the vessel was carrying on its cargo manifest. We might call it a kind of ‘titanium pepper,’ but, in any case, it made things taste good to Fuzzies, and they sprinkled it on everything they ate.”
“So far, so good. The castaway Fuzzies weren’t exactly living in the lap of luxury, but they were making do—and they were reproducing at a reasonable rate as they adapted to the alien environment of Zarathustra.”
“Then, catastrophe number two arrived.”
“An earthquake caused a landslide which buried the mouth of the cave and covered the wrecked ship. Those Fuzzies in the cave were wiped out. The only survivors were the ones who happened to be out gathering nuts or picking the lettuce in the valley. They were completely cut off from all the items of salvage, the remnants of their technology, and their parent culture.”
“Now they know nothing of their own history except what is in their own minds. Hard times and a lot of survival pressure conspire to accelerate the erasing of that memory.”
Holloway could tell, from looking around the room, who had already been exposed to this knowledge. The ones who were not looking astonishedly at Ybarra and the visual presentation that accompanied his remarks were obviously the ones who already knew. Little Fuzzy was serenely smoking his pipe. Starwatcher had his arms folded across his little chest, his legs crossed, and his khaki barracks cover hung on one knee. Diamond was fascinated—because he had only heard the news at the Fuzzy Conference earlier in the afternoon.
“Water from the mountain, though,” Ybarra was saying, “continued to leak down through the rocks covering the wreck of the S.S. Fuzzy—and continued to leach titanium compounds down into the valley. There wasn’t any more spice, but by this time the native vegetables weren’t so bad, and the folks were making do.”
“Several centuries passed. The main group of Fuzzies continued to stay in the valley. Colonies that tried to form satellite settlements always died out in a couple of generations. By this time, Fuzzies have forgotten that their metabolisms require titanium and that it is a vital component of their biochemistry. Titanium, as you may or may not know, is very scarce in Zarathustra’s crust—e
xcept in the soil of Fuzzy Valley.”
The tape-chip slowly lap-dissolved into an image of the recorded pickup of the Big Blackwater Project.
“And, now,” Ybarra said, “here comes catastrophe number three. The Chartered Zarathustra Company started to drain a half-million square miles of swamp on the coast of Beta. That caused a drought in the Piedmont—where Jack Holloway had a camp in Cold Creek Canyon, near where Cold Creek joined the Snake River. New maps refer to Cold Creek as Holloway’s Run, and a scientific study center has grown up there, along with the Zarathustran Native Protection Force headquarters. The place is now commonly referred to as Holloway Station. The drought also extended— He outlined the geography on the projected map with his light-pointer. “—into the volcanic foothills and Piedmont of Northern Beta Continent, where we see Fuzzy Valley, north of the Fuzzy Divide.
“The valley dried up for lack of rain. The native vegetation began dying off. Dry weather for two winters in a row did, however, hatch out a bumper crop of land-prawns. The land-prawns migrated into Big Woods, and, eventually, down across Fuzzy Divide into Deep Woods, since a principal component of their food chain on Zarathustra is the forest moss that bears traces of titanium.”
“Land-prawns are about the only thing left that tastes good to Fuzzies, so they followed that general volkerwanderung southward.”
Ybarra switched off his light-pointer and held up the index finger of the hand which still held it. “But, you say, the Upland Fuzzies didn’t follow the volkerwanderung, and they have different cultural habits—like large-scale cooperative hunting. Why is that?”
“The Upland Fuzzies belong to a different social class. They are mostly descendants of the paramilitary crew of the Fuzzy ship. They long ago forgot why the crew should stick close to the site of the crashed ship—they just know that they should. The ‘passenger descendants’ are oriented toward individualism, laissez-faire, and those sorts of things. The ‘crew descendants’ are conditioned to ritualized activities, such as complex teamwork, close-order drill, and such-like.”
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