- It was the turn of other factions of the audience. Eckard, who’d admitted that aggressive planet colonizers were pushing his Council hard, ran a finger around his collar. Anelen blinked, bis expression unreadable.
Praedar leaned forward, using all his mesmerizing arts. “I repeat—we who are in the field with intelligent primitives must ' judge the situation. In the case of the N’lacs, this expedition is firmly convinced that it would be unforgivably immoral either to sit with folded hands or forcibly to change their way of life.”
He continued into a broad summary of his project, tying up loose ends and foiling the quibblers before they had a chance to get their credits’ worth in. From Dan’s point of view, it was one hell of a sales pitch. Praedar talked just long enough and quit. He left listeners hungry for more.
Praedar’s opponents refused to stay down, though. The ques-lion-and-answer session was such chaos that Dan didn’t understand how Praedar could hear himself think, let alone cope with what his challengers were yelling out at him. The translators, which had smoothed any jerkiness from Praedar’s speech, converting Whimed abruptness into hypnotic eloquence, went into overdrive. Somehow, Praedar made sense of the mess, maintaining his serenity, and Dan’s awe of the alien rose several more notches.
The Saunders dug in on one of their key points: the lack of grave excavations on T-W 593. A large number of attendees seconded them. There was a current popularity for analyzing xeno-archaeological remains, and the Saunders rode that wave for all the momentum they could get. Praedar repeated his reminder that his team was dealing with a living race, and desecrating the graves of their ancestors would be an offense.
“... may I note that the grave dates the Drs. Saunder have published coincide precisely with those we have obtained by remote probes and nonintrusive investigations. Given the correspondence of these dates, are we to accept that a civilization appeared, full-blown, on T-S 311? No earlier artifacts than the two millennia prior to the present date have been offered. Did this culture thrive for less than a Terran century and vanish as suddenly as it came into being, with no indication of a natural or humanoid-made disaster?”
That triggered another explosive round of approval and rebuttal. The Assembly’s official timekeepers had to step in and stop the uproar. The debate shifted to the exhibit hall. As the midday break neared, numbers shrank. Eventually the combatants dwindled to a precious few and gave up. Praedar had obviously relished the clash. His teammates, though, needed a recess.
The break seemed all too short. A couple of hours later, they were back in the packed auditorium, sitting in the audience, this time, as the Saunders began their presentations. Dan sat to the far left near the front row, studying faces around him and gauging reactions rather than listening to his relatives’ familiar arguments. Not too surprisingly, there were more saunder spells superior selectivity badges than the counterattack ones in the crowd. This was, after all, the Assembly hosts’ big event.
The media attended in force. Rei Ito sat apart from the science publication staffers. Dan wondered if she was being ostracized as a network reporter. Not that it mattered. He doubted any of the news hounds were going to be impartial in this war of theories.
Saunder-McKelvey money always added impressive weight to whatever project the affluent family members were involved in.
There was considerable whispering about Greg Tavares’s absence from the platform. Maybe that would balance out Getz’s defection from Praedar’s team.
Unfortunately, Feo and Hope had plenty of reputable associates to fill the gap left by their protege’s disgrace. Saunder team players paraded to the dais, presenting their papers. It was apparent they’d rehearsed for months—possibly coached by an imported PR expert. Speeches were honed and polished, delivery crisp.
Discouraged, Dan gave his seat to one of the many standees and retreated to the rear of a room. He overheard a xenoarch remark to her friend, “Not spectacular, but Saunder’s a decent scientist, I’ll give him that,” and his spirits sank.
The question-and-answer sessions were heated. But they were the same, familiar arguments, the same ground being gone over yet once more. After a while Dan tuned them out, surveying the hall. Praedar was sitting beside their sponsors and occasionally eyeing Eckard and Anelen calculatingly. Was the Whimed fearful, as Dan was, that all the hard work and the team’s devotion to the N’lacs had gone for nothing? What a tragedy, if the project and the N’lacs died because of such petty things as Anelen’s dislike of non-Whimeds, his disapproval of a shady starhopper ownership shift, and Eckard’s unwillingness to stand up to powerful colony developers.
Kat slid her hand through Dan’s crooked arm. He glanced down as she leaned against him, seeking comfort. “Why can’t they see?” she murmured. “It’s so important, for Chuss’ people, for the truth.”
Attendees turned, scowling, fingers to lips. Dan disengaged his arm and wrapped it around Kat, holding her close. They listened to the reminder of the presentations in gloomy silence.
Dan wasn’t really hearing the people on the stage. Visions marched through his mind’s eye: N’lacs, affectionate and sharing; offworlders, digging until they were exhausted, seeking the proof that too few of their fellow xenoarchaeologists would believe; the mural, portraying a civilization’s reach for the stars; and a handful of slaves, escaping, fleeing ...
Kat’s grip tightened around his waist and Dan came out of his daymare. Applause was filling the hall. Feo, quite wisely, had let Hope handle the summary for their team. She hadn’t canceled out good impressions by being too long-winded. Dan and Kat joined the clapping politely, as the Saunders had for their presentations. Even in a battle, courtesies must be honored among humanoids.
Would they be, by creatures as alien as the Old Ones?
The rest of that day and most of the next was a wearisome anticlimax. Praedar had more bases to touch, more flesh to press, more points to make. Dan’s job, however, was bound up with the starhopper. He skipped the final morning’s minor programming —given to the field’s newcomers and a few less important papers. While that was going on, Dan was at the Port, prepping the craft, getting that top-off fuel package Feo had promised, and loading it. The manager apologized for the short unit. Fear of Commander Adam McKelvey was still gnawing at the local personnel. Dan, in a black mood, did nothing to reassure them. Let them chew their nails. His team had been doing that ever since they’d arrived on this damned planet.
In the afternoon, most Assembly functions began to shut down. Exhibits were dismantled and readied for shipment. Feo and Hope, ever the gracious hosts, provided staffers and vehicles to assist their guests. This time Praedar didn’t argue. He accepted the help. Even so, transferring the specimens was a bitch. Dan pumped his med boosters again and again and hit the caffa heavily. It took them till dark to get all the materials—except Getz’s —stowed.
Then there was one more ordeal to. get through before they could go home.
Each of the Xenoarchaeological Assemblies concluded with a formal. It was intended as a pleasant social gathering, a relaxing wind-up to days of intensive intellectual activity. This one, though, was going to be an additional tension-causer for Praedar’s team.
As Dan emerged from his roomlet, Kat said, “Hey, that’s nice.” She walked around him, examining the tunic suit he’d exhumed from Fiona’s lockers. “Chic. You look every centimeter the Saunder-McKelvey princeling.”
“At least it still fits,” he said sourly. “Good thing these basic styles are back in. That’s all I could afford, the first time these clothes were available. I couldn’t afford this good nowadays.” He returned Kat’s compliments, admiring her glittering gown as she pirouetted for his inspection.
“This isn’t particularly up-to-date or expensive, either,” she said.
Joe Hughes chuckled. “Ah, but businesslike simplicity is always in fashion.” His formal suit was very similar to the one Dan wore. They exchanged self-congratulatory grins and Joe said, “We’ll
do fine. We aren’t the only impecunious field diggers here. Just think of it this way. The Saunders have to spend big credits to achieve the charming plainness we’ve come up with. Besides, a lot of our colleagues were never interested in fashion trends. No matter what the occasion, they look as if they slept in their clothes.”
“Appropriate,” Kat said, “when one’s mind is millennia in the past.”
Dan muttered, “I wonder if the N’lacs partied, just before the roof fell in on their civilization?”
“Quite possible,” Praedar replied, then gestured toward the suite’s outer door, urging them to move.
The T-W 593 group made a striking quintet—if Dan did say so himself—as they arrived at the fast-filling Assembly hall. Ruieb-An’s floor-length metallic robes caught and magnified light. Praedar’s spectacularly patterned skin-tight jumper matched his black, silver, and red crest. Dan and Joe bracketed Kat, doing their best to look confident and elegant.
Media reps waylaid them frequently, taking holos. The team was small enough to fit nicely within a single focus, and the multispecies nature of the five added spice.
Rei Ito greeted them. Her gown was much fancier than Kat’s, but Dan thought Kat was far more attractive. For this occasion, the Pan Terran reporter had decorated her lens pendant with a circlet of ornate gems. The effect blinded her subjects while she was capturing their images.
Without any prior discussion, the group decided to stick close together. An old phrase, safety in numbers, popped into Dan’s head—not that they could claim many numbers!
Like the opening socializer, this affair tended to split along racial lines. There was only a modicum of mingling. Most Vahnajes gravitated toward the enclosed, private refreshment islands set aside for their use. Ruieb-An, though, chose to stay with his team. Praedar huddled with Whimed colleagues when they approached him. But when the encounters ended, he rejoined Dan and the others.
The crowd eddied, forming pools where friends conversed or rivals rehashed differences. The room wasn’t as jammed as it had been for the earlier ceremonies. Many humans and aliens had already left T-S 311. They had appointments to keep elsewhere, or they were dissatisfied with what they’d accomplished at the Assembly and wanted to get away and lick their wounds. Were Tavares and Getz among that latter segment? They certainly weren’t in the hall. However, Praedar’s presence here showed his enemies that he hadn’t run.
Anelen and his aides walked briskly toward the five. Ruieb and the humans prudently stepped aside. The Whimeds went into a snarling huddle for a few moments, then separated, facing each other, panting. Anelen and Praedar traded clipped, guttural words.
Ruieb frowned, trying to follow the alien chatter and not succeeding. Dan glanced at Kat and Joe. They shook their heads. Kat said, “It’s dialect, and rattle-fast, at that.”
The confrontation stopped as quickly as it had begun. Anelen hurried away, staring angrily at a group of Vahnajes as he did.
Praedar was motionless, his expression frozen and tense. Slowly he roused himself as Kat asked tentatively, “Did he...?” “No reply.” The Whimed’s eyes were shimmering mirrors, reflecting the room’s shifting overhead illumination. “He has not temporized so before.”
Dan winced. That sounded bad—bad for the expedition and bad for the N’lacs.
When they bumped into Councilman Eckard a short time later, he was no more encouraging than his felinoid counterpart had been. “You mustn’t push, Juxury. You know we have a lot of irons in the fire besides yours. Smuggling operations that have to be quelled. Coordinations with the Terran and Whimed Fleets. Settlement establishments. Colony applications. Trade affairs. All sorts of topics. We’ll be convening in... oh... about twelve Earth weeks. I’ll get back to you when I can.” Eckard and his staff strolled on, to deal with other grant and license seekers.
The disappointment of those two meetings was but one strain in an evening crammed with them. Dan dodged one question after another concerning his credentials. Maybe Rei Ito was keeping a lid on her info, but other reporters and scientists had their own suspicions, and wanted to dig. Kat fought to hang onto her temper as Saunder supporters scoffed at her xenosocio theories. Joe and Ruieb-An and Praedar had to cope with critics, too.
And always the media circled, their lenses probing.
Feo and Hope toured, receiving congratulations. Royalty, saying good-bye to their subjects.
The Saunders beamed, pressing the flesh. “So grateful you could attend. We wanted our friends to have a taste of home, as it were...”
Late in the affair, drawn together by an invisible magnet, the two groups met in the center of the hall. Rei Ito and the rest of the media revolved in orbit around them.
The initial contact was peaceful enough.
“Your presentation went well, Juxury. You’re an incredible speaker. Where did you learn Terran English? You put most humans to shame,” Hope gushed.
“Thank you. It is a flexible language. Chen taught me its nuances,” Praedar said. “Your material was well received, was it not?”
“Oh, yes. No complaints. No, not at all.” The Saunders noted Kat’s gown and scattered polite praise on Joe and Ruieb-An. “And did you enjoy yourself, Danny?” Feo asked.
Dan forced a feeble smile. “Was I supposed to? I thought this was a working session, not a Saunder-McKelvey gala.”
The inane grin slid off his cousin’s face. “You’re taking this interpretation of data disagreement entirely too seriously, my boy.”
“No, he is not,” Praedar said, his crest stiffening. “Unlike you, Dan knows that the eminence of your family will continue only so long as its members do not cling to stagnant havens at the cost of truth and progress.”
“Really!” Hope exclaimed, bristling. “We do not feel driven to rush blindly into wild hypotheses...”
Kat leered. “Maybe that’s because you’re too wrapped up in preserving your reputation, not in finding the facts. We,” she said, mimicking Hope, “are willing to take risks. We put our lives and reputations on the line to uncover the true history of this stellar area...”
Worried Saunder staffers were flocking around their bosses, trying to hold the reporters at arm’s length. They couldn’t. Rei Ito, in particular, was devouring the exchange, collecting more juicy gossip for her network’s boss, soon to be her brother-in-law.
Feo drew himself up haughtily. “Very well. I don’t feel this is the place for such sordid discussions, but... what is this area’s ‘true history,’ as you put it? How did this supposed enslavement of those primitives’ ancestors take place? According to your own materials, the existing civilization destroyed all its spacecraft. Do you doubt Ruieb-An’s translations of those data? Do you have any explanation of how those people were allegedly removed to some... some anthropomorphic species’ slave camps? And how did the primitives—the escaped slaves—return to T-W 593? Did their shaman wave a magic wand?”
Dan had held his tongue during the earlier scientific debates. Now he jumped in with both feet. “That’s what an alien technology often appears to be, Feo—a magic wand. When the Vahnajes made contact with us, humanity was stuck in its own solar system. The Terrans of that era believed that FTL was impossible. They refused to accept that it existed until the Vahnajes’ spacecraft shoved the reality in our faces. And it took a lot of sacrifice and work before your grandmother and my grandfather proved Terra could build its own stardrive. For all we know, the nonanthropomorphic race that conquered the N’lacs used a technology even farther beyond our comprehension than FTL was to mid-twenty-first-century humans.”
“That’s right,” Joe said. “Even if we don’t know how the populations were removed, they were. Eventually we’ll discover the method. The fact is, the N’lacs vanished from T-S 31I in the same time frame that they did on their mother world...”
“Colony world,” Feo corrected him.
“Mother world,” Dan insisted.
“What do you know about—”
“He knows a
great deal,” Praedar cut in. By now his crest was a spiky flag. His calm voice contrasted with that emotional barometer. “Dan listens. He learns. He does not blind himself to data for selfish reasons...”
“What does he have to protect?” Hope snapped. “Don’t be deluded by his name, luxury. I think you’re the one who’s blinded. Dan hardly qualifies as a typical member of our family, someone worth paying attention to.”
“I’m no fat cat, if that’s what you mean,” Dan said. “You seem to forget that our ancestors didn’t start with a bottomless supply of money, Feo. You’re using your fortune to buy a career. But how will the future generations of Saunders and McKelveys view you? As a pioneer, an innovator? Someone who wasn’t afraid to take chances and test brand-new ideas? That definition fits our grandparents. Does it fit you? Or are you and Hope dilettante offshoots from the main tree?” He adopted Kat’s tactic and aped a future vid historian, lecturing: ‘“Feo and Hope Saunder had all the advantages. They should have made a significant contribution to xenoarchaeology. Instead they played it safe and went nowhere..
Both groups hurled accusations.
“The graves! You didn’t excavate...”
“And you haven’t located any graves on T-S 31I beyond the invasion date, or any earlier than a century before...”
“No reconstructions. You’re concocting your theories piecemeal to describe the impossible
Juanita Coulson - [Children of the Stars 04] Page 26
