Charles DeVett & Katherine MacLean

by Cosmic Checkmate

  I hoped these people would understand the face-saving ritual of negotiation, the disclaimers of intent, that would enable each side to claim that there had been no war, merely accident.

  “We did not at all feel that you were justified in wiping the fleet from space,” I said, “but it was probably a legitimate misunderstanding …”

  “You had been warned!” Trobt’s voice was grim, his expression not inviting of further discussion. I thought I detected a bunching of the muscles in his arms.

  For a moment I said nothing, made no gesture, letting the subject go by. Apparently this angle of approach was unproductive—and probably explosive. Also trying to explain and justify the behavior of the Federation politicos could possibly become rather taxing.

  “Surely you don’t intend to postpone negotiations indefinitely?” I asked tentatively. “One planet cannot conquer the entire Federation.”

  The bunched muscles of his arms strained until they pulled his shoulders up, and his lips whitened with the effort of controlling some savage anger. Apparently my question had impugned his pride.

  This, I decided quickly, was not the time to make an enemy. “I apologize if I have insulted you,” I said in Earthian. “I do not yet always understand what I am saying, in your language.”

  He hesitated, made some kind of effort, and shifted to Earthian. “It is not a matter of strength or weakness,” he said, letting his words ride out on his released breath, “but of behavior, courtesy. We would have left you alone, but now it is too late. We will drive your faces into the ground. I am certain that we can, but if we could not, still we would try. To imply that we would not try, from fear, seems to me words to soil the mouth, not worthy of a man speaking to a man. We are converting our ships of commerce to war. Your people will see soon that we will fight.”

  “Is it too late then for negotiation?” I asked.

  His forehead wrinkled into a frown and he stared at me in an effort of concentration. When he spoke it was with a considered hesitation. “If I make an effort, a great effort, I can feel that you are sincere, and not speaking to mock or insult. It is strange that beings who look so much like ourselves can …” He rubbed a hand across his eyes. “Pause a moment. When I say yag loogt’ n ’balt what does it mean to you in Earthian?”

  “I must play.” I hesitated as he turned one hand palm down, signifying that I was wrong. “I must duel,” I said, finding another meaning in the way I had heard the phrase expressed. It was a strong meaning, judging by the tone and inflection the speaker had used. I had mimicked the tone without full understanding. The verb was perhaps stronger than must, meaning something inescapable, fated, but I could find no Earthian verb for it. I understood why Trobt dropped his hand to the seat without turning it palm up to signify that I was correct.

  “There must be no such thought on the Human worlds,” he said resignedly. “I have to explain as to a child or a madman. I cannot explain in Veldian, it has no word to explain what needs no explanation.”

  He shifted to Earthian, his controlled voice sounding less firm when moving with the more fluid inflections of my own tongue. “We said we did not want further contact. Nevertheless you sent the ships—deliberately in disregard of our expressed desire. That was an insult, a deep insult, meaning we have not the strength to defend our world, meaning we axe so helpless that we can be treated with impoliteness, like prisoners, or infants.

  “Now we must show you which of us is helpless, which is the weakling. Since you would not respect our wishes, then in order to not be further insulted we must make of your people a captive or a child in helplessness, so that you will be without power to affront us another time.”

  “If apologies are in order …”

  He interrupted with raised hand, still looking at me very earnestly with forehead wrinkled, thought half turned inward in difficult introspection of his own meaning, as well as a grasping for my viewpoint.

  “The insult of the fleet can be wiped out only in the blood of testing—of battle—and the test will not stop until one or the other shows he is too weak to struggle, lying without defense. There is no other way.”

  He was demanding total surrender!

  I saw that it was a subject which could not be debated. The Federation had taken on a bearcat this time!

  Night was well along now and very dim yellow lights shone in some of the windows of the big buildings, but there were no lights along the shadowy street where we parked our convoy.

  Kalin Trobt, military strategist, member of the advisory council of Velda, looked along the street in the direction we were to go.

  “I stopped because I wanted to understand you,” he said, “because others will not understand how you could be an envoy—how your Federation could send an envoy—except as an insult. I have seen enough of Human strangeness to be not maddened by the insolence of an emissary coming to us, or by your people expecting us to exchange words when we carry your first insult still unwashed from our face. I can even see how it could perhaps be considered not an insult, for I have seen your people living on their planets and they suffered insult from each other without striking, until finally I saw that they did not know when they were insulted, as a deaf man does not know when his name is called.”

  I listened to the quiet tone of his voice, trying to recognize the attitude that made it different from his previous tones—calm, slow and deep—certainty that what he was saying was important—conscious tolerance—generosity.

  He turned on the tricar’s motor and put his hands on the steering shaft. “You are a man worthy of respect,” he said, looking down the dark empty road ahead. “I wanted you to understand us. To see the difference between us. So that you will not think us without justice.” The car began to move.

  “I wanted you to understand why you will die.”

  I said nothing—having nothing to say. But I began immediately to bring my report up to date, recording the observations during the games, and recording with care this last conversation, with the explanation it carried of the Veldian reactions, that had previously been obscure.

  I used nerve-twitch code, “typing” on a tape somewhere inside myself the coded record of everything that had passed since the last time I brought the report up to date. This was valuable information.

  The typing was easy, like flexing a finger in code jerks, but I did not know exactly where the recorder was located. It was some form of transparent plastic which would not show up on X-ray. The surgeons had imbedded it in my flesh while I was unconscious, and had implanted a mental block against my noticing which small muscle had been linked into the contrivance for the typing.

  It would be worth a hazard to find out something about the Veldian war equipment, and try to find a power source to broadcast the report back, but I did not see any immediate chance of access to that power source.

  If I should die before I wake …

  If I died before I was able to return to Earth, I had been informed there were several capsuled chemicals buried at various places in my body, that intermingled would temporarily convert my body to a battery for a high powered broadcast of the tape report, destroying the tape and my body together. This would go into action only if my temperature fell fifteen degrees below the temperature of life.

  The thought of the chemicals was disturbing. I had informed my friend Mark that I wanted to look in on Velda, to see if our mutual problem could be solved by logic, and informed him that by …

  I became aware that Kalin Trobt was speaking again, and that I had let my attention wander while recording, and taped some subjective material. The code twitches easily became an unconscious accompaniment to memory and thought, and this was the second time I had found myself recording more than necessary.

  Trobt watched the dark road, threading among buildings and past darkened vehicles. His voice was thoughtful. “In the early days, Miklas of Danlee, when he had the Oman family surrounded and outnumbered, wished not to destroy them, for he needed good warriors,
and in another circumstance they could have been his friends. Therefore he sent a slave to them with an offer of terms of peace. The Ornan family had the slave -skinned while alive, smeared with salt and grease so that he would not bleed, and sent back, tied in a bag of his own skin, with a message of no. The chroniclers agree that since the Oman family was known to be honorable, Miklas should not have made the offer.

  “In another time and battle,- the Cheldos were offered terms of surrender by an envoy. Nevertheless they won against superior forces, and gave their captives to eat of a stew whose meat was the envoy of the offer to surrender. Made to eat their own words, as you’d say in Earthian. Such things are not done often, because the offer is not given.”

  He wrenched the steering post sideways and the tricar turned almost at right angles, balanced on one wheel for a dizzy moment, and fled up a great spiral ramp winding around the outside of the red Games building.

  Trobt still looked ahead, not glancing at me. “I understand, from observing them, that you Earthians will lie without soiling the mouth. What are you here for, actually?”

  “I came from interest, but I intend, given the opportunity, to observe and to report my observations back to my government. They should not enter a war without knowing anything about you.”

  “Good.” He wrenched the car around another abrupt turn into a red archway in the side of the building, bringing it to a stop inside. The sound of the other tricars entering the tunnel echoed hollowly from the walls and died as they came to a stop around us. “You are a spy then.”

  “Yes,” I said, getting out. I had silently resigned my commission as envoy some five minutes earlier. There was little point in delivering political messages, if they have no result except to have one skinned or made into a stew.

  IV

  A heavy door with the seal of an important official engraved upon it opened before us. In the forepart of the room we entered, a slim-bodied creature with the face of a girl sat with crossed legs on a platform like a long coffee table, sorting vellum marked with the dots and dashes, arrows and pictures, of the Veldian language.

  She had green eyes, honeyed-olive complexion, a red mouth, and purple-black hair. She stopped to work an abacus, made a notation on one of the stiff sheets of vellum, then glanced up to see who had come in. She saw us, and glanced away again, as if she had coolly made a note of our presence and gone back to her work, sorting the vellum sheets and stacking them in thin shelves with quick graceful motions.

  “Kalin Trobt of Pagael,” a man on the far side of the room said, a man sitting cross-legged on a dais covered with brown fur and scattered papers. He accepted the hand Trobt extended and they gripped wrists in a locked gesture of friendship. “And how survive the other sons of the citadel of Pagael?”

  “Well, and continuing in friendship to the house of Ly-agin.” Trobt replied carefully. “I have seen little of my kin. There are many farlanders all around us, and between myself and my hearthfolk swarm the adopted.”

  “It is not like the old days, Kalin Trobt. In a dream I saw a rock sink from the weight of sons, and I longed for the sight of a land that is without strangers.”

  “We are all kinfolk now, Lyagin.”

  “My hearth pledged it.”

  Lyagin put his hand on a stack of missives which he had been considering, his face thoughtful, sparsely fleshed, mostly skull and tendon, his hair bound back from his face, and wearing a short white cotton dress beneath a light fur cape. A communicator stylus and a vision screen of some sort rested on the table top around his dais, and a short sword and long glaive crossed on the wall behind him. They seemed to be of bronze, or some bronze-colored metal.

  I felt the annotator in my mind jump as it noted the bronze weapons. I waited a minute, but nothing more came and my attention shifted to the vision screens.

  I had seen them before, but I had not yet been able to find the opportunity to open one and learn if it worked on the same principles as our own communication of pictures. The sets were remarkably compact, being almost a flat screen, with a depth of only four inches behind the picture, and had no other attachments. All those I had seen were of the same size, their use universal, and almost entirely for practical purposes, seldom for viewing entertainment of any sort.

  Lyagin was an old man, already in his senility, and now he was lost in a lapse of awareness of what he had been doing a moment before. By no sign did Trobt show impatience, or even consciousness of the other’s pause.

  Lyagin raised his head after a minute and brought his rheumy eyes into focus on us. “You bring someone in regard to an inquiry?” he asked.

  “The one from the Ten Thousand Worlds,” Trobt replied.

  Lyagin nodded apologetically. “I received word that he would be brought,” he said. He inspected my physique and stance with meager interest. “He seems to be outwardly like a man, this outworlder. We will soon see if he be actually a man. How did you capture him?”

  “He came.”

  The expression must have had some connotation that I did not recognize for the official let his glance cross mine, and I caught one slight flicker of recognition to acknowledge that I was a person.

  “He has the bearing of a hunter,” Lyagin said. “Perhaps he may even prove to be a Man. If you want him questioned, we shall soon learn.” Apparently his words were meant as a compliment. Their opinion of Humans was not high. However, his words had other implications which were not pleasant. Again I thought: This is moving too fast—and perhaps my time is running out.

  “You say these Humans lie?” Lyagin asked Trobt.

  “Frequently. It is considered almost honorable to lie to an enemy in circumstances where one may profit by it.”

  “You brought back from his worlds some poison which insures their speaking truth, I believe?”

  “Not a poison, a drug, which affects one like strong drink, dulling a man and changing what he might do. Under its influence he loses his initiative of decision.”

  Trobt apparently had brought the truth drug back from the Worlds in anticipation of taking Human prisoners. He was a farsighted man.

  “You have this with you?” Lyagin asked.

  “I left it with Vay of the Hunt department,” Trobt replied.

  Despite my own mental discomfort I marked yet another point of admiration for him. He was going to waste no time using me. I had much that he wanted to kpow, and he intended to get from me anything that might be of value to them. Inwardly I resolved that it would not be as easy as he might suppose.

  - Lyagin gripped a double handle on the side of the vision screen and squeezed, at the same time looking me over thoughtfully. “I had such information,” he said to Trobt. “I’d allowed myself to forget it. I see now what its use will be. I have always distrusted torture for breaking a silence, and with such as he, there would be no surety that he spoke the truth—even with torture. It will be interesting having an enemy co-operate. If he finds no way to kill himself, he can be very useful to us.” So far my contact with the Veldians had not been going at all as I had planned.

  But I was not whipped yet. They would find that out.

  Lyagin held a note against the screen, which had begun flashing red. “It is ready,” he said.

  The boy-girl at the opposite side of the room finished a problem on the abacus, noted the answer, and glanced directly at my face, at my expression, then locked eyes with mine for a brief moment. The iris of her eyes shaded to a darker green, then quickly lightened again. When she glanced down to the vellum it was as if she had seen whatever she had looked up to see, and was content. She sat a little straighter as she worked, and moved with an action that was a little less supple and compliant.

  I believe she had seen me as a man.

  They injected the truth serum into my left hip.

  I had little fear—even after I found that I was unable to tell a direct untruth under the drug’s influence.

  I answered each question they gave me. Questions that were intended to
use my knowledge ,of the Ten Thousand Worlds against my own race.

  Most of the late evening they probed for answers to our military strength, numbers of ships of war, potency of our weapons, and devices of strategy and tactics.

  I made no attempt to resist the drug. I answered truthfully—but literally. Many times my answers were undecipherable—I did not know the answers, or lacked the data to give them. And the others were cloaked under a full literal subtlety that made most of them useless to the Veldians. Questions such as the degree of unity existing between the Worlds: I answered—truthfully—that they were united under an authority with supreme power of decision. The fact that that authority had no actual force behind it; that it was subject to the whims and fluctuations of sentiment and politics of inter-alliances; that it had deteriorated into a mere supernumerary body of impractical theorists, that occupied itself, in a practical sphere, only with picayune matters, I did not explain. It was not asked of me.

  Would our Worlds fight? I answered that they would fight to the death to defend their liberty and independence. I did not add that that will to fight would evidence itself first in internal bickering, procastinations, and jockeying to avoid the worst thrusts of the enemy—before it finally resolved itself into a united front against attack.

  Trobt took no part in the early questioning. It was conducted by Veldians trained in that work. However, I could sense his mounting dissatisfaction. He realized what was happening, but he realized also that only someone with a background of culture the same as my own would know how to phrase the questions so as to get the answers he wanted— and to grasp the full meaning of the answers when he got them.