"Du-paay-nil. Prepare for inspection by Safety Officer."
Of course they'd chosen this time. Dupaynil smiled sweetly into the shiny lens of the surveillance video, and finished with a double-tuck-roll that took him back into the minute sanitation cabinet. No shower, of course. A blast of hot air, then fine grit, then hot air again. Had he been covered with scales, like a proper liz . . . Seti, they'd have been polished. As a human, he felt sticky and gritty and altogether unclean. He would come off this ship smelling like a derelict from the gutter of an unimproved frontier world . . . no doubt their intent.
He had his uniform almost fastened when the hatch to his compartment swung back, and a large Seti snout intruded. They timed it so well. No matter when he took exercise or was using the sanitary facilities, they announced an inspection. No matter how quickly he tried to dress, they always arrived before he was finished. He found it curious that they didn't interrupt meals or sleep, but he appreciated even that minimal courtesy.
"Aaahh . . . Commaanderrr . . ." The Safety Officer had a slightly off-center gap between front teeth. Dupaynil could now recognize it as an individual. "Iss necesssary that airrr tesst be con-duc-ted."
They did this every few inspections, supposedly to be sure that his pressure suit would work. It meant a miserable struggle into the thing, and a hot sweaty interval while they sucked the air out of his quarters and the suit ballooned around him. Dupaynil reached into the narrow recess and pulled out the suit. Not his choice of suits but, the Fleet attaché had assured him with a smile, the only one in his size at the embassy. At least it had held up, so far, with only one minor leak, easily patched.
He pushed and wriggled his way into it, aware of the Seti's amusement. Seti faced the uncertainties of space travel without pressure suits. While they had such suits for those who might need to work on the outer surface of a ship, they did not stock suits for the whole crew. It made sense. Most of the time when a Fleet vessel lost hull integrity, the crew never made it into their suits anyway. And of course a Seti would have been disgraced for insisting on a way of cheating chance. Still, Dupaynil was glad to have a suit, even though the Seti considered it another example of human inferiority.
He dogged the helmet down snugly and checked the seals of the seam that ran from throat to crotch. The suit had an internal comm unit which allowed him to speak, or more often listen, to the Seti. This time, he heard the Safety Officer's instructions with amazement.
"Come to the bridge?"
Humans were never invited to the bridge of Seti ships. No human had ever seen the navigational devices by which the gamblers of the universe convinced themselves they were being obedient to chance while keeping shipping schedules.
"At once."
Dupaynil followed, sweating and grunting. He had not had to put on his suit for this. Seti kept breathable, if smelly, atmosphere in their ships. No doubt they intended to make him look even more ridiculous. He had heard, repeatedly, what the Seti thought of human upright posture. It occurred to him that they might have insisted on his suit simply to spare themselves the indignity of a human's smell.
When he reached the bridge, it bore no resemblance whatever to that of a Fleet ship of the same mass. It was a triangular chamber—room for the tails, he realized—with cushioned walls and thickly carpeted floor, not at all shiplike. Two Seti, one with the glittering neck-ring and tail ornament that he had been told signified ship's captain, were crouched over a small, circular, polished table, tossing many-sided dice, while one standing in the remaining corner recited what seemed to be a list of unrelated numbers. He felt cramped between the table and the hatch that had admitted him and then slammed behind him. The Seti ignored Dupaynil and he ignored that, finally trying to figure out what land of game they were playing.
The dice landed with one face flat up, horizontal. Three dice at a time, usually, but occasionally only two. He didn't recognize the markings. From where he stood, he could see three or four faces of each die and he amused himself trying to figure out what the squiggles meant. Green here, with a kind of tail going down. All three dice had this on the top face for a moment. Purple blotch, red square-in-square, a yellow blotch, two blue dots. The dice rose and fell, bouncing slightly, then coming to stillness. Green squiggles again, and on the other faces purple, blue dots, more red squares-in-squares.
The Seti calling out numbers paused through two throws. Dupaynil's attention slid from the dice to the Seti, wondering what the purple blotch on the napkin-like cloth around his neck meant. When he looked back at the board, the green squiggles were on top again.
Surely that couldn't be right, and surely they didn't just want an observer for the captain's nightly gambling spree. He watched the dice closely. In another two throws, he was sure of it. They were loaded, as surely as any set of dice that ever cheated some poor innocent in a dockside bar. Time after time the green squiggles came up on top. So why throw them? His mind wandered. Probably this wasn't the bridge at all. Some bored Seti officers had just wanted to bait their captive human. Then a fourth die joined the group in the air and down came three green squiggles and one purple blotch.
Three Seti heads swung his way, toothy jaws slightly open. He shivered, in his suit. If that was bad luck, and they thought he had brought it . . .
"Ahhh! Humann!" The captain's voice, through his comm unit, had only the usual Seti accent. "It wass explained to me that you were ssent here by very sspecial luck. Ssso your luck continuess. As the luck fallss, you sshall be told, though it makess danger to usss."
Dupaynil could not bow. The suit gave him no room for it.
"Illustrious bringer of luck," he began, for that was part of the captain's title. "If chance favors your wish to share precious knowledge, my luck is great indeed,"
"Indeed!" The captain reared back on massive hind legs, and snapped its jaws. A sign of amusement, Dupaynil remembered from handbooks. Sometimes species-specific. "Well, o lucky one, we ssshall sssee how you call your chance when you know all. We ssshall arrive even sssooner than you thought. And we shall arrive in forccce."
The Seti could not mean that the way a human would, Dupaynil thought. Surely not . . .
"Do you grasssp the flying ring of truth from tossssed baubles?" the Seti asked. Dupaynil tried to remember what that meant, but the Seti captain went on. "You ssshall sssee the ruin of your unlucky admiral, he who tossed your life against the wissdom of our Sek, in the person of the Commissioner of Commerce, and you shall see the ruin of your Fleet . . . and of the Federation itself, and all the verminous races who prize certainty over Holy Luck. Sssee it from the flagship, as you would say, of our fleet, invincible unless chance changes. And then, o human, we ssshall enjoy your flesh, flavored with the smoke of defeat." The captain's massive snout bumped the screen of Dupaynil's helmet.
From the frying pan of Sassinak's displeasure, to the fire of the conspirators on Claw, he had come to the Seti furnace. If this was luck, he would take absolute determinism from now on. It couldn't be worse. He hoped the Seti could not detect the trickles of sweat down his back. He could smell his own fear, a depressing stench. He tried for a tone of unconcern.
"How can you be certain of this destination by throwing dice?" Not real thought, but the first words that came into his mouth, idle curiosity.
"Ahhh . . ." The captain's tail slapped the floor gently, and its tail ornament jingled. "Not pleass or argumentss, but ssense. As chance favors, I sshall answer."
His explanation of the proceedings made the kind of oblique sense Dupaynil expected from aliens. Chance was holy, and only those who dared fate deserved respect, but the amount of risk inherent in each endeavor determined the degree of additional risk which the Seti felt compelled to add by throwing dice or using random number generators. "The Glorious Chaos," as they named that indeterminate state in which ships traveled or seemed to travel faster than light, had sufficient uncertainty to require no assistance. So they tossed loaded dice, as a token of respect, and to allow the go
ds of chance to interfere if they were determined.
"War, as well," the captain continued, "has its own uncertainties, so that within the field of battle, a worthy commander may be guided by its own great wisdom and intuition. Occasionally one will resort to the dice or the throwing sticks, a gesture of courage all respect, but the more parts to the battle, the less likely. But you . . ." A toothy grin did not reassure Dupaynil at all. "You were another matter and judged sufficiently certain of unsuccess without our chance to place you in the toss. As your luck held, in the unmatched dice, so now I offer to chaos this chance for you to thwart us. I told you our plan, and you may ask what you will. You will not return to your quarters."
Dupaynil fought down a vision of himself as Seti snack-food. If he could ask questions, he would ask many questions.
"Is this venture a chance occurrence, or has some change in Federation policy prompted it?"
The captain uttered a wordless roar, then went into a long disjointed tirade about the Federation allies. Heavyworlder humans, as victims of forced genetic manipulation, roused some sympathy in the Seti. Besides, a few heavyworlders had shown the proper attitude by daring feats of chance: entering a Hall of Dispute through the Door of Honor, for instance. Some humans were gamblers: entrepreneurs, willing to risk whole fortunes on the chance of a mining claim, or colonial venture. That the Seti could respect. The Paradens, for instance, deserved to lay eggs. (Dupaynil could imagine what the elegant Paraden ladies would think of that.) But the mass of humans craved security. Born slaves, they deserved the outward condition of it.
As for the allied aliens . . . The captain spat something that Dupaynil was glad he could not smell. Cowardly Wefts, the shifters who would not dare the limits of any shape . . . Bronthin, with their insistence on mathematical limits to chaos and chance, their preference for statistical analyses. Ryxi, who were unworthy to be egglayers since they not only sexed their un-hatched chicks, but performed surgical procedures through the shell. The Seti had the decency, the captain snarled, to let their eggs hatch as they would and take the consequences. The Ssli, who insisted on giving up their mobile larval form to become sessile, bound to one location throughout life: a refusal to dare change.
Dupaynil opened his mouth to say that Ssli anchored to warships in space could hardly be considered "bound to one location," remembered that not everyone knew about the Ssli in Fleet ships and instead asked, "And the Thek?"
This time the captain's tail hit the floor so hard its ornament shattered.
"Thek!" it roared. "Disgusting lumps of geometrical regularity. Undifferentiated. Choiceless, chanceless, obscene . . ." The ranting went on in a Seti dialect Dupaynil could not begin to follow. Finally it ran down and gave Dupaynil a sour glance. "It is my good fortune that you will flavor my stew, miserable one, for you irritate me extremely. Leave at once."
He had no chance to leave under his own power. At some point, the captain must have called for Seti guards because they grabbed the arms of his suit and towed him along strange corridors much faster than he could have gone by himself.
When they finally stopped and released his arms, he was crammed in a smallish chamber with an assortment of aliens. The Bronthin took up the most cubage, its chunky horselike body and heavy head impossible to compress. A couple of Lethi were stuck together like the large yellow burrs which they greatly resembled. A Ryxi huddled in one corner, fluffing and flattening its feathers, and in a translucent tank, two Ssli larvae flutter-kicked from end to end. On one wall, a viewscreen displayed sickening swirls of violent color: the best an exterior monitor could do in FTL space. Beside it, a fairly obvious dial gave the pressure of various atmospheric components. Breathable, but not pleasant.
So the Seti had collected an array of alien observers to gloat over, had they? Dupaynil wondered who the human would have been, if he and Panis had not shown up. Certainly not the Fleet attaché. Probably the Ambassador. Had they all been told what was going on? He cracked the seal of his helmet cautiously and sniffed. A tang of sulfur, a bit too humid and warm and clearly no shower in sight. With an internal sigh, he took off his helmet and attempted a greeting to his new companions.
No one answered. The Ryxi offered a gaping beak, which Dupaynil remembered from a training manual meant something like "Forget it, I don't want to talk to you unless you've got the money." He had never learned Bronthin (no human ever had) and the tubby blue mathematicians preferred equations to any other form of discourse anyway. Lethi had no audible communications mode: they talked to each other in chemical packages and could not interface with a biolink until they formed a clump of at least eight. That left the Ssli larvae, who, without a biolink, also had no way of communicating. In fact, no one was sure how intelligent the larvae actually were. They were in the Fleet Academy to learn navigational theory but Dupaynil had never heard of one communicating with an instructor.
He could try writing them a message, except that he had nothing to write with, or on. The Seti had not brought any of his kit from his compartment; he had only the clothes and pressure suit he stood up in.
It really wasn't so bad, he told himself, forcing cheerfulness. The Seti hadn't killed them yet. Didn't seem to be starving them, though he wondered if that slab of elementary sulfur was really enough for the Lethi clinging to it. He found a water dispenser, and even a recessed cabinet with oddly shaped bowls to put the water in. He poured himself a bowl and drank it down. Something nudged his arm and he found the Bronthin looking sorrowfully at the bowl. It gave a low, grunting moo.
Ah. Bronthin had never been good with small tools. He poured water for the Bronthin and held the bowl for it to drink. It swiped his face with a rough, corrugated lavender tongue when it was done, leaving behind a faintly sweet odor. A nervous chitter across the compartment was the Ryxi, standing now with feathers afluff and stubby wings outspread. Dupaynil interpreted this as a request and filled another bowl. The Ryxi snatched it away from him with its wing-claws and drank thirstily.
"They for us water pour but one time daily," the Ryxi twittered, dropping the empty bowl. Dupaynil picked it up with less graciousness than he'd filled it. He had never been the nurturing type. Still, it was communication. The Ryxi went on. "Food at that time, only enough for life. Waste removal."
"Did they tell you where we're headed?"
An ear-spitting screech made him wince. The Ryxi began bouncing off the walls, crashing into one after another of them, shrieking something in Ryxi. The Bronthin huddled down in a large lump, leaving Dupaynil in the Ryxi's path. He tried to tackle it but a knobbed foot got him in the ribs. The Ryxi flipped its crest up and down, keening, and drew back for another kick, but Dupaynil rolled behind the Ssli tank.
"Take it easy," he said, knowing it would do no good. Ryxi never took it easy. This one calmed slightly, sides heaving, crest only halfway up.
"They told," came the sorrowful low groan of the Bronthin. Dupaynil had never heard one speak Standard before. "Wickedly dangerous meat-eaters. We told Theks what would come of it. Those who sweep tails across the sand of reason, where proofs of wisdom abound." The Bronthin had accomplished advanced mathematics without paper or computers, using smooth stretches of sand or clay to scribe their equations. Although their three stubby fingers could not manipulate fine tools, they had developed an elegant mathematical calligraphy. And a very formal courtesy involving the use of the "sands of reason." A colt (the human term) who used its whisk of a tail on someone else's calculations would be severely punished. Bronthin were also strict vegetarians—browsers on their world which had small and witless carnivores. They were pacifists.
Dupaynil eyed the calming Ryxi warily. His ribs hurt. He didn't need another kick. "Do you have any plan?" he asked the Bronthin.
"The probability of escape from this ship, in a nonviable state, is less than 0.1 percent. The probability of escape from this ship in a viable state is less than 0.0001 percent. The factors used to arrive at this include the . . ."
"Never mind," sa
id Dupaynil, softening it with an apology. "My mathematical skill is insufficient to appreciate the beauty of your calculations."
"How kind to save me the trouble of converting to Standard that which can only be properly expressed in the language of eternal law." The Bronthin heaved a sigh, which Dupaynil took to mean the conversation was over.
The Ryxi, however, was eager to talk, once it had calmed enough to remember its Standard.
"Unspeakable reptiles," it twittered. "Unworthy to be egglayers!" Not again, thought Dupaynil, not anticipating the Ryxi side of that argument. "Thick-shelled, they are. You can't even see a Seti in its shell. Not that it makes any difference, because even if something's wrong, they won't do anything. Just let the hatchlings die if they can't make it on their own. Some of them don't even tend their nests. Not even to warn away predators. They say that's giving Holy Luck the choice. I'd call it criminal negligence."
"Despicable," said Dupaynil, edging farther away from the dance of those powerful feet. Then a bell-like voice rang out, its source unidentifiable.
Dupaynil tried to control his start of surprise, and glanced around. The Bronthin looked half-asleep which is the way Bronthins usually looked and the Ryxi had begun grooming its feathers with jerky strokes of its beak. The two Lethi were still stuck to each other and the slab of sulfur.
Of course. Ssli. So Ssli larvae could communicate! He could not "feel" anything in his mind when the voice fell silent, but that didn't mean it, or they, were not reading him.
Generation Warriors Page 25
