And Turn About

 

And Turn About

 

The secretary loomed over Futhmop: "The Servant will see you now.  Come."  Some of the dignitaries waiting for an audience looked askance at Futhmop's academic uniform, but he heard no murmurs. 

The secretary led the way, moving easily, for all his bulk.  He was an impressive specimen, soberly but impeccably uniformed, as befitted the secretary of the South Western Regional Servant.  He arched his tails as if he were on parade, bearing them with an air that suggested that there simply was no other way to hold them. 

It was traditional for the personal staff of high officials to be military guards as well, though Futhmop reflected that it had been a long time since there had been anything to guard against.  Still, the Oormewers were very much creatures of tradition and the older the tradition the better.  This particular tradition stemmed from events about twelve thousand years forgotten and it would take something dramatic to disestablish it. 

"The Studious Futhmop." The announcement was impassive, but Futhmop could hardly miss the disdain.  For the Servant to grant an appointment to anyone from the ranks of the academics was surprising in any event.  The secretary's manner somehow suggested furthermore, that for that academic to be a professor of archaeology was positively degrading.  Futhmop composed his jowls and tails into a posture appropriate to a senior academic, but even if he had been gifted with a natural grace, the poses prescribed for civilians were anything but smart.  The Servant cringed conventionally in dismissal of the secretary and bowed to hide his jowls as he waved his visitor to a seat.

"You look well, cousin, but concerned," he said once they were alone.  That greeting would have explained part of the puzzle to the secretary.  Family connections were powerful among the Oormewers, though cousinhood in itself would not guarantee a private audience with the Regional Servant. 

Futhmop certainly was concerned,  concerned enough to brave the overwhelming surroundings and the commitments necessary to justify an audience.  He rushed through the civilities.  He was grateful for the opportunity to bring a matter of vital importance to the attention to the highest authorities.  Steps had to be taken.  The Servant hid impatience, keeping his tails still, expecting his kinsman to ask for some dig or relic to be granted funds or protection.  It was a serious matter to take up his time with anything so minor on the strength of family connections, but Futhmop had never importuned him before, so the Servant did not immediately throw him out. 

"Dekelkert, I have been examining the ruins of the library at Amethalka.  The area is to be scandalously razed to make room for a highway and I wish to record as much as possible before it is too late.  The ruins have been extensively studied and I did not expect to find anything novel, but in the event I made a major discovery of an unknown underground extension with immensely valuable new material.  I have made a discovery of the most vital importance."

"Cousin, all our traditions are of vital importance to soldierly morale, but so are our contemporary developments.  For me to delay, never mind re-route, the highway for the sake of academic studies, would be unmilitary.  I can do no more than authorise perhaps some support for you to rescue as much material as you can, during the time that the construction approaches the site of the library."  Servant Dekelkert made to terminate the appointment. 

"No, cousin, no!  I would not dream of disturbing you with anything so trivial!"  Proper as the sentiment was, the Servant could not suppress a twitch of his tails at hearing an archaeologist refer to such a matter as trivial.  "Cousin Dekelkert, what I have found could involve the survival of the race!" 

Servant Dekelkert reacted with polite incredulity and total puzzlement.  Absently he gripped the worry-bone he wore as a pendant.  It was a memento of his first major promotion.  Fondling the platinum mounting and clicking his claws through the tooth marks, he said: "I find it hard to believe that anything you might unearth from a pre-Crisis ruin could spell such a disaster as to be a threat to the race.  Surely no bomb or disease could remain viable for twelve thousand years?" 

"Certainly not, Servant!  What I found was information that we lost during the Great Crisis, concerning our origins.  Mercifully I was fortunate enough to be able to read the texts of the Amethalkan period."  (The Servant knew that his cousin was in fact the leading authority on the millennia-old scripts and speech, but convention forbade anything like outright boasting in non-military professions.)  "What I read was worse than a bomb or a plague."

Servant Dekelkert regarded his cousin in silence for a moment.  In their adolescence they had been close.  Futhmop, though intelligent, had always been conscientious to the point of paralysis.  It was what had kept him from the military career traditional in their family.  Dekelkert had never seen him in anything like such a state.  "If you really are so concerned, you had better tell me the essence.  I cannot imagine what an ancient library could hold to threaten us in these days, but cousin, I must urge you to consider the pressures of my position and the rank of others waiting for an audience."

"Dekelkert," formality faded as Futhmop got to the meat of the matter, "in the Great Crisis we lost practically all detailed knowledge of our origins.  History vanished.  It was a disaster as great as the Crisis itself.  To lose one's history is a death for the race, as real as any plague or nova. . ."

"You mean that the destruction you foresee is the loss of our history?" Dekelkert maintained his politeness with difficulty.  His jowls grew conspicuous and he tapped his worry-bone on the desk.  "If that is the case, then you might as well have said so in your application and I would have taken the necessary steps without expending an audience. . ."

"No, no, please cousin, I speak of literal, physical destruction!  Please hear me out!  I beg you to overlook my unmilitary incivility, but this could be the end of us all!" Dekelkert subsided once more, still fermenting, still puzzled, but compelled to attention by his supplicant cousin's frantic sincerity.  "I will try not to digress again.  The thing is that in the records I found real, authoritative, official records of the Great Crisis and of a still greater crisis that preceded it.  It also explained why the records of pre-Crisis history had vanished.  All our speculations and controversies between archaeologist and historian, between biologist and physicist, concerning our origins are resolved, but," (seeing his cousin's jowls beginning to spread) "it also introduced the fact that the pre-Crisis destruction of our civilisation, the one you do not know of, could be repeated and we must prepare to meet it as soon as possible, or we could all die."

Dekelkert had quietly been running the worry-bone along a fang.  He came to a decision.  "Cousin, you say that what you have found amounts not to an academic disaster, but actual, literal, imminent destruction of our race?  Yes?"

"I have no way of knowing how imminent Servant, but yes, real destruction."    Dekelkert dismissed the qualification with a flick of the worry-bone.  He rattled his claws rhythmically as he spoke and emphasised each question by rapping the bone on the desk.  "You are sure and have actual, objective, demonstrable, verifiable grounds for your claim?  You are prepared to demonstrate those grounds now, on pain of a charge of frivolous audience?"  His jowls expanded and his measured, forceful authority in stressing each point committed his visitor to accepting a grave liability.  The alternatives, should a charge of frivolous audience be brought, were military menial service (not actually jail, as we know it, but it might as well be) and psychiatric detention.  Either would mean ruin for an academic, but Futhmop did not hesitate.  He shrank into a defensive posture, but instead of his jowls vanishing, they whitened and flattened out sideways into an attitude of unwilling defiance; the gesture of one who wishes to submit, but is forced to stand his ground. 

"Servant, I am willing to present my material for examination at any time the Authority chooses.  The sooner the better, as I do not know at what moment disaster may strike.  Convene a meeting of your leading advisors and I will address them, but please, please, make it soon!"

Dekelkert regarded him yet again.  To labour the seriousness of the matter any further was clearly pointless.  "You had better tell me about it first."  He spoke over the communicator to the secretary: "Inform the noble staff awaiting an audience, that their Servant grovels, but that there will be an indefinite delay before their just demands for attention can be met.  Those who wish, may reschedule their audiences.  Others may await their Servant's freedom to give them a delayed audience today, should that be possible." 

He turned back to his cousin.  "Now Futhmop, first let me hear the whole story from you.  Then I will decide what action to take and what conferences to call."

"Servant, twelve millennia ago we destroyed most of our heritage; in fact we came close to destroying our entire race.  We vaunt the Great Crisis as a time of testing and of victory against our enemies within," dangerous talk.  Dekelkert clasped his worry bone and twitched a tail.  Futhmop took the hint and hurried on: "And this is good, of course, as we cannot expect military morale to be maintained in the shadow of a tradition of disaster, but in the inner circles a few of us are aware that, though of course true, it is not the whole story. 

"In the end, good came of it all, such as the establishment of the Council of Servants, but at a terrible price.  For the most part the price was material; you know better than I  how large a percentage of this very planet is still barren after all these centuries, but that was not all; maybe not even the worst of it. 

"Now, I realise that history is more important to academics than to the Servants of our race, who have to deal with urgent practicalities (such as barren continents, to be sure) every day, but this is different.  We nearly were destroyed before the Crisis and it may happen again and maybe this time finally.  What my findings describe is what things were like before the Crisis. 

"See Servant, in those days there were two peoples. . ."

                   ---------------------

. . . in those days there had been two peoples in a fairly dense part of the galaxy, where the mean separation between significant stars was less than half a light year.  Both races had settled planets in several solar systems and both were systematically expanding their empires when they met. 

After the first panicky clashes there had been little overt friction, but as it turned out, that was largely because neither side was in a position to do much in the line of military adventuring.  Interstellar pioneering is very, very expensive, but interstellar war is even more so and planetary colonising expeditions do not routinely carry the wherewithal to wage war on anything but intransigent nature.  After a few deaths and misunderstandings had been glossed over, after a few negotiations had been settled, things seemed so civilised that those who had seen the bitter, makeshift conflicts of the first contacts could hardly believe it.  Soon the peoples had established trade and on the three planets where they had both established colonies, they co-existed in peace. 

It took several centuries for trouble to surface.  Colonial Nolgus, especially those who had had experience of the Dreppers, had proverbs about buying fards in pokes and maintaining fences and guarding your back, but by human standards, things seemed pretty peaceful.  Privately the Nolgus assumed the credit for the peace.  The Dreppers were a militaristic, aggressive race.  Physically they were larger and stronger than the Nolgus and it was superior technology and resourcefulness that had kept the Nolgus from being overrun in the contact skirmishes.  Subtle advantages in technology were not much comfort in day-to-day dealings though; for the Nolgus it was like doing business with tigers.  No matter what the situation might be in principle, it was hard to assert oneself with a creature that could reach out and crush you.  Containing the aggressive tendencies of the Dreppers without giving ground or giving offence, was a feat.  The Nolgus used whatever means came to hand, but depended largely on exploiting the Dreppers' rigid hierarchical discipline. 

It was only after some five hundred years that the Nolgu authorities discovered that Drepper duplicity was not limited to trade and negotiation.  It then became clear that the Dreppers had been planning destruction or enslavement of the Nolgus even at the signing of the first treaties. It seemed all of a piece with a mentality that could demand a treaty, the Nolgus agreed bitterly.  Treaties were a Drepper custom.  Nolgus had never thought of such a thing as a treaty or a written agreement, but the Dreppers had seemed so much at a loss without something to sign, that the Nolgus had consented.

By the time that the Nolgu government had confirmed what was going on, they were at a hopeless disadvantage.  Dreppers were overwhelmingly stronger, militarily.  If Nolgus were to declare war, they were in a strategically untenable position.  For one thing, by that time Dreppers outnumbered Nolgus even on most of the nominally Nolgu planets. They procreated like polyle, while Nolgu reproduction was density‑dependent, with one dominant fertile female per family group.  In fact, population pressure was one reason why Dreppers were pioneering faster than Nolgus.  Few Nolgus had settled among Dreppers.  For those that did, stress inhibited breeding more strongly than overpopulation did. 

Nolgu leaders conferred in secrecy.  They realised that their civilisation as it stood, was doomed.  The question was what to save, what to destroy and how to do either.  If the Dreppers had understood them better, they might have realised that the opaque Nolgu psychology made them more dangerous than they seemed.  Nolgu successes during the contact conflict should have been a warning.  Emotionally Nolgus were a cold-blooded lot, and even their children's games emphasised the concept of making the attacker pay for aggression.  It was an attitude that permeated their thinking and they proceeded accordingly.

Things move slowly on the scale of interstellar politics.  It was another few centuries before the Dreppers struck.  They were uniformly successful.  When they had done, there were only a few billion Nolgus left alive on all their planets and apart from a few short-lived resistance groups, these were slaves, surviving on sufferance till their masters should decide that they had no more use for them. 

In such an advanced technology the need for servants was limited.  Surplus Nolgus were dispensed with rather than emancipated.  The Dreppers disposed of unwanted stock partly by attrition and partly by straightforward culling (or genocide, to put it less prettily).  Not that this mattered much. Surviving Nolgus hardly bred anyway, because of the domination effect.  They barely lasted long enough to feed each other into recycling units.  Within two generations the race was extinct, except for a few specimens in zoos, whence they soon were promoted to museums. 

It all went very smoothly for the Dreppers.  The originally troublesome Nolgus had turned out serendipitously.  Not only had they yielded some most gratifying technology, but they had prepared no less than seventeen worlds for occupation as going concerns. 

There were discrepancies of course, between what the Dreppers had expected and what they found.  Certain stockpiles of resources were unaccountably low; certain industrial bases were unaccountably slight; some rumoured technological achievements turned out to have been pipe dreams; some eminent figures seemed to have been mythical, though there was no apparent reason to have invented them.

Some populations were lower than Drepper intelligence had believed; in particular there were fewer breeding females  than one might have expected.  The space fleets were surprisingly small and a fair number of spacecraft were known to be missing, though that was not surprising.  Some, for instance, had been used in kamikaze attacks on captured cities.  They were of no practical military significance as far as the Dreppers knew; there had never been an incentive to build specialised offensive spacecraft.  Even Drepper craft, surreptitiously armed, were a minor component of their forces, mostly used for military transport.  Escaped Nolgu ships could do no more than perish wastefully in space. 

Anyway, these were niggles, in comparison to having gained practically intact, the riches of seventeen flourishing worlds.

Five hundred years later there was one disconcerting incident.  A Nolgu spaceship was found derelict in near space.  It had been wrecked in an accident of some sort.  It resembled no known model of vessel and was certainly nothing like five hundred years old.  Still, one small Nolgu wreck did not a peril make, not when manned by five space-desiccated corpses. Little more than desultory speculation came of it for yet another few centuries.  By then such interest as there had been, faded in favour of higher priorities; bolts from the blue, so to speak.

Without any warning, the atmosphere of one face of the mother planet, Drepper, was partly blasted into space by a microwave pulse that covered the hemisphere more or less facing the galactic north east.  The pulse lasted for barely a few seconds, and carried more energy than anyone had the nerve to calculate.  Actually, at first no one even knew that there had been a blast consisting mainly of microwaves, or that it had come from space.  For all that survivors could tell, it might have been an inconceivable storm and an instant plague that struck dead everything in the open and a lot that was not.  Masonry structures and stores of industrial materials exploded.  Cities vanished in fire storms.  Whole prairies of crops cooked, charred, then slowly rotted.  Oceans steamed, clouds vanished, then reformed to cover first the hemisphere, then practically the whole planet.  Livestock convulsed, burst and stank.

Even the fringes of the pulse crippled or wrecked spacecraft and space installations wholesale, but on the opposite side of the planet hardly anyone knew at first that anything had happened at all.  If they heard no word from communicators or spacecraft, they remained undisturbed for the hours that it took the blast waves to travel round the globe to reach them.

All that the best-informed of the survivors knew was that billions of their race died and half a planet's industry and agriculture were blasted without warning or obvious cause. After all, there were no prospective novae or supernovae anywhere within thousands of light years. Storms raged and shock waves blasted, but these were mere swirls in the train of that first vast blow.  It took a long time to make sense of such an unthinkable disaster, unthinkable in scope or in nature, but a day and a half later the unthinkable repeated itself, well before many Dreppers had progressed to thinking it. 

The new blast overlapped the first hemisphere by about a third, and rather more than two days later still, yet another pulse struck the planet, which by this time was reduced to less than one sixth of its area of not-too-badly damaged surface.  Then there was a sudden change.  Two pulses from roughly the opposite direction covered the rest of the planet thoroughly.

The planet Drepper, as a functioning community, was in ruins.  Scattered millions had survived, mainly underground or in metal structures, but for each survivor there were hundreds in their death throes and tens of thousands of cooked, burst corpses.  There was no one to bury them; not even scavengers to clean them up.  Heavily populated planets have little room for the vultures of their ecology and such scavengers as had survived the Dreppers, survived no longer.  Their charred remains lay among an unprecedented but unappreciated abundance. 

There was no intact industry, agriculture, infrastructure, or medical support.  Millions who could in principle have survived, died of burns, wounds, and hunger, or perished claustrophobically in lifts or mines, for sheer lack of any intact services that could have saved them.  Groups of survivors turned on each other in shock, and, Drepper-like, fought to the death till the victors consumed the corpses of the vanquished.  Millions of spacecraft had been destroyed and millions more had been badly damaged.  The Dreppers had not yet been wiped out in the sense of killing every one, but on the planet the race had been so thoroughly smashed that without outside help, it would revert to savagery and take thousands of years to recover, if it ever did. 

Even the prospect of savagery turned out to be academic, however.  More blasts struck at irregular intervals till there was practically nothing left.  The very atmosphere was reduced by about a quarter.  The bombardment continued for decades.  First came the planet-wipers and the fleet-smashers.  Then came the mopping up.  In the end, even outposts and small pioneering and research settlements were blasted. 

Help from other worlds was all that a few hundred thousand scattered survivors could hope for, but they might have spared themselves the futility.  Within several years, similar beams had struck all fifty-five planets in their empire, or so it seemed to survivors in spacecraft (survivors in the ground were in no position to tell.)  In fact, all the worlds had been struck "simultaneously" in the sense that they would have had not the least chance of receiving help or warning from each other.  From the point of view of each planet, planets in every other system were struck several years later, unless one allowed for the time it took light to travel between systems.  Planets that shared a solar system were struck practically simultaneously, and from various directions, usually within hours of each other. 

As only two of the Drepper systems had more than one occupied planet, this meant that for most planets, the least time it took to get signals from other planets was over a year and some of them took decades.  It was true that suns in that region averaged about half a light year apart, but most were dwarfs and all the colonised planets orbited various sizes of class G or K stars that averaged a few light years apart.

Fairly soon, considering the circumstances, surviving Dreppers, mainly in spacecraft, worked out what had happened.  They determined that the pulses were microwaves and concluded that they came from the Nolgus.  They even had worked out where one of the sets of pulses came from, an apparent brown dwarf.   They did not know this, but it was where some of the more comprehensive charts destroyed on the planets would have shown a white dwarf about a millennium earlier.  It was not clear whether they ever managed to pinpoint any other sources, though they had one region pretty well narrowed down. 

There was not a lot they could do about it anyway, as the sources were some tens of light years distant and by the time they reached them, there would be nothing left to avenge.  In fact, by the time these craft started out, the stars had very likely already stopped sending more pulses; any pulses still on the way would take years to arrive and would be more than sufficient.

Vengeance often is pointless of course, but that idea did not inhibit the understandably embittered survivors.  Some serviceable Drepper ships did start on missions of retribution, but they vanished without apparently achieving anything.  The Nolgus had expected them and prepared accordingly.  No one mourned the futility of Drepper valour, though.  Decades before the punitive expeditions had met their fate, the parent worlds were rubble.  A few hundred cave-dwelling savages squabbled where a mere century earlier there had been vigorous technological empires of hundreds of billions.

What had happened was that the Nolgus had dedicated to retaliation, all the resources they could spare without giving away the game to the Dreppers.  The scale of the sacrifice had been irrelevant.  Whole populations, whole planets, everything holy, everything precious, everything dear — nothing  was spared.  Anything that couldn't be diverted unobtrusively to the Aim was left to the gratified, though ungrateful, Dreppers.

The Nolgus had selected suns at widely separated sides of the sphere of influence of the combined Nolgu and Drepper empires.  They had chosen the tiniest, least important white dwarfs and some other inconspicuous, generally otherwise useless, stars that would meet their needs.  Around each one they had built a reflective shell of thin material.  The shell was far too thin to hold its shape in orbit and was maintained in position by radiant pressure. In each capsule they had constructed huge force-field masers that were driven by the bulk of the sun's output.  The efficiency was low, but the output of even a dwarf star is quite respectable when accumulated for a few hours.  The blasts were directed according to schedules that covered the entire combined empires.  Intelligence was gathered by spy colonies that hung undetectably in interstellar space and monitored every major development on the Drepper worlds.

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Dekelkert looked dubious.  He had been absently stropping his claws on his worry-bone throughout the latter half of the story.  "You found all this in the ruins?  You are sure of both the sense of what you read and its reliability?  I find it hard to credit either the technology or the inability of such a large empire to defend themselves from such a simple threat."

"Cousin, you know what a commitment it was for me to ask for the audience.  I would not have gambled my academic future and my freedom on such a wild tale if I had not been sure; very sure.  Even so, I did not come rushing to you as soon as I had convinced myself.  To gather cogent material, I approached a number of authorities in physics, space engineering, planetary ecology, oh. . . and a few others. 

"Without letting them know the basis for my queries, I checked on the feasibility of a number of technical points.  I have documented their informal answers, but the essence is that while they disagreed on, or were dismissive of, some points, the major ones they all confirmed as routinely feasible.  The configuration of force-field masers is such that they can be scaled up to almost any size, better than linearly.  After all, that is why we use them almost exclusively as our source of power from the suns.  The reason we don't make them any larger than we actually do, is that we have no use for anything larger than what will power our planets and space craft and communication between stellar systems.  By their very nature they can be pumped by almost any short wave radiation and they are unique in their coherence. Apparently it is difficult to make them accumulate power in pulses, but quite feasible."

"Yes," discontentedly, "but to encapsulate a sun?  Two suns!  And if we grant that our ancestors could do anything of the type in those primitive times, then why could the Golnus not defend themselves? 'Nolgus'?"  He clicked his tails irritably, a clear sign of stress in a dominant Oormewer.  "Oh.  Well Nolgus then.  They could detect the sources, surely, of coherent beams of light?  They could have put out detectors and sent warning so that people could take shelter?"  His jowls were more conspicuous than ever, but were now almost as pale as Futhmop's.

"No Dekelkert, think: How do you send warning that a pulse of light is on its way?  You need to see the pulse first and you cannot see light before it reaches you.  And you can't see a beam of light from the side, not in space, not unless it hits something, and by that time it is too late. Then, if you've survived the passing pulse, which you probably have not, you can only pass the word by sending your own signal pulses and they will arrive only after the pulse you are trying to give warning of.  After all, they too are only light."

Futhmop warmed to the subject: "And it is all very well seeing the source of a beam, but we are talking of pulses; perhaps sub-second pulses.  They probably spread in the interstellar medium, but that still meant that the Dreppers had to base their analysis on a few unpredictable events of a few seconds duration and with no record.  At first the best indication of the direction of the source would have been which way the hemisphere of the planet was facing when it got blasted.  Rather an extravagant detector!" He bit off a slightly hysterical giggle. "Besides, what do you do about the pulse?  Just hop out and build an umbrella in space?  An umbrella to cover a whole planet?"  Futhmop giggled a bit more sharply.  "You would need two umbrellas per planet anyway, to guard against the attacks from both sides.  It wouldn't be much good protecting the planet at ground level; the storms alone would wreck everything." He quoted a snatch from a patriotic military song: "The might that maims even what it misses!"  He hiccoughed, trying to suppress a third giggle.

"Pull yourself together!" his cousin snapped, as he might have done when they were adolescents.  He had been badly shaken by the vision of worlds of people being swallowed up in unavoidable, undetectable, incomprehensible blasts from apparently empty space. "Even if you're right, what about the stars? Astronomers would have noticed the disappearance of two stars surely? And how can a few fugitives encapsulate a star?"  He clenched his great jaws on the bone and twisted it, paring visible turnings from the grooves where his teeth habitually gripped. 

"Servant, our region of space is strewn with dwarfs, including many white dwarfs.  Only a few of them are of interest to anybody.  No one sends expeditions to them.  They seldom have planets and when they do, they have no ecosphere.  They are of no navigational or explorational value and for details on most of them you must consult catalogues centuries old.  Labpyper of the Tamonar observatory showed me some of the catalogues; totally incomprehensible — and those volumes were almost unused.  As for encapsulating stars, to cover a small dwarf at a radius close enough for such purposes, say in a thin skin of silicon compounds, internally silvered with aluminium, the material of a single modest-sized asteroid of suitable constitution would be adequate."

"But, putrescence gut it, such a skin would be gravitationally unstable!  It would be swallowed by the sun within weeks, even if you could get it built!" Even the reversion to their adolescent relationship could not by itself have reduced Dekelkert to such an undignified mode of speech; he was rattled and his composure was fraying.  A growl was roughening his voice.

"No Dekelkert.  The capsule would be held in place by radiation pressure and solar wind.  Louvers under automatic control would let out light in various directions to correct drift."

"You have thought of everything, haven't you?"  Dekelkert's tails cracked spitefully together.

"Not I, cousin.  I am as. . .  I am ignorant in these fields.  Most of the material I got straight out of the records.  I too, doubted at first, till I got corroboration from experts in other fields.  And as soon as I knew what I was looking for, independent evidence from hundreds of other sources overwhelmed me.  I was able to make sense of any number of archaeological puzzles that had been bedevilling our interpretation of the archaeology of the Crisis.  The foundations of the cities of Roethtyl and the middens of Porilmalk, for example.  Not to mention hundreds of submarine wrecks."  With an effort, Futhmop suppressed the urge to expand on the most important archaeological find of his race.

"But I must point out Servant, those refugees were anything but primitive.  They were far more advanced than we were in the days after the Great Crisis when we were piecing together our civilisation after the collapse.  In some ways they were more advanced even than we are today.  I had a hard time with some of the authorities I consulted, who wanted to know where I had learned certain things.  Whatever else we do, we must get all readable material out of those ruins before the highway reaches it. . ."

Servant Dekelkert had pulled himself together.  He removed the bone from his jaws and dropped it to dangle beneath his relaxing jowls.  He relaxed his tails.  "This is a chilling history you have related, cousin, and if there is anything to it at all, I will, in spite of what I said before, have to support you in rescuing as much material as we can, irrespective of what it means to the highway.  But I am the Servant of my region, a practical administrator, and I fail to see how this history of, what. . .  twenty‑four thousand years ago? affects our survival, our physical survival, as you said."

"Oh, but I said. . .  Didn't I make it clear?  Servant, there were millions, possibly billions, of Drepper spacecraft in transit at the time of the destruction and many of them survived.  Some of them formed groups in exile, mainly groups that had settled somewhere in space.  They were not as well equipped as the original Nolgu force, which had prepared specifically for their mission and which later moved in to occupy the planets they had blasted, where we live now, in fact, but with so much material and so many of the pick of their race in space, some Dreppers survived. 

"Now Servant, what do you think those survivors would do once they were secure? They had no prospects while the destroyers of their planet lived, and they were a bitter race, so don't you think that they would dedicate their all to revenge?  And they knew what had been done and knew the technology, so. . ."

"Death of the egg!  Are you mad to suggest such defeatism?"  Rearing over his desk, Dekelkert spread his claws into a frightful threatened embrace.  His tails rattled feverishly.  His jowls expanded into a huge black-flushing shield for his throat.  "That is impossible!  Get out!  Out, I say!  As sure as I tore this bone from the throat of my rival, I'll have you. . ."  Then he subsided, collapsed into his seat and got a grip on himself.  For a moment he watched his cousin cringe his way towards the door, till it burst open and the secretary appeared, weapon at the ready. 

Dekelkert waved him out again with one tail, then called Futhmop back to his seat.  "Be still!"  He retrieved his dangling bone and sat scoring it with his fangs as he thought. 

"No Futhmop," he said at last, dropping the bone to bob again at the end of its Oormewer-hide lanyard, "you are an academic, not an administrator.  You don't have any conception of the scale of infrastructure it would take to support a civilisation that could harness suns.  Our ancestors, the Gol. . . Nolgus, had the advantage of hundreds of years of preparation and even then it was centuries before they were ready to attack."  He tucked away his jowls and re-composed himself into an attitude of relaxed dignity, tails dangling down their grooves in the seat.  "For scattered, unprepared spacecraft to come miraculously together to do the same thing would be quite impossible."

Futhmop stared him in horror. "But Servant. . ."

"No no, cousin; quite, quite impossible!  You have brought something very striking, quite shocking in fact, to our attention, and very properly too; it does you credit, real credit, but it is a matter of academic interest; very great academic interest certainly, and I shall certainly make arrangements to ensure that the highway does no harm to your library.  No, don't look so worried, I give you my word, even a bureaucrat like myself can see the importance of your find, so you can rest assured. . ."

"Dekelkert, listen to me! The Nolgus were not our ancestors; the Dreppers were!"

Even allowing for stress, actually shouting down the Servant of an area as large as Asia was too much.  Dekelkert did not go into overt threat mode again, nor did he even growl, but his jowls once more flushed black and his tails went briefly into castanet mode.  "Studious Futhmop," he said stonily, "We are not particularly interested in details like the precise names of races long dead. You have taken too much time already and have gained a major concession — major concession.  Now pull yourself together and . . . WHAT?"

"Exactly Servant!  Don't you see?  The Nolgus were nothing like the Oormewers!  Puny, underhanded alien savages with obscene breeding habits and no sense of military discipline.  Oormewer ancestors did indeed manage to salvage a space‑based civilisation from the surviving fleet and turned the tables on the alien murderers.  They built their own masers and destroyed the Nolgus in the same way that they had been treacherously attacked millennia before.  But Servant, it took them over twelve thousand years; as you pointed out, they started from a greater disadvantage than the Nolgus.  But during that time the Nolgus had flourished and at least as many of them had in turn survived.  What the Dreppers had done, the Nolgus certainly could copy." 

"And Servant…” Futhmop paused for increased emphasis: “our Great Crisis gave them an extra recovery period of twelve thousand years.  That is a long time, Servant.  Our ancestors did in fact find several Nolgu colonies in the early centuries of the Retribution, and destroyed them, but they knew that they had not found all.  In fact, immediately pre‑Crisis, they were thinking of sending out a general survey to look for all possible survivors, but apparently the Great Crisis struck just about then.  I have not yet examined enough material, but I get the impression that dissent about such expeditions was one of the factors that gave rise to the Crisis."  Futhmop's eyes clouded at the thought of how his people had come nearly as close to wiping out their own kind as ever the enemy had. 

Once more Dekelkert motioned him to silence.  For maybe fifteen minutes the Servant sat, recovering and digesting all he had heard.  When Futhmop, starting to get a cramp, stirred unobtrusively, Dekelkert pulled himself together with a snap of his tails, and communicated with his secretary: "Gerwapkert, no more audiences today."  For him to omit the forms of courtesy was stunning, but the secretary could make up the deficiency.  Meanwhile the Servant turned back to his cousin.  "My apologies.  Your story and theory are ridiculous, but the sheer scale of the risk is so immense that I cannot ignore it.  What do you suggest we do about it?"

"Servant, I am an only archaeologist, not a Servant of the Race.  It seems to me that we should prepare to save whatever we can in the event of such a counterattack and should seek out all the places where it might be launched from.  One physicist said that an encapsulated star would have a characteristic radiation which we could scan for.  Then again, another thought that encapsulation would not be necessary.  But all I feel qualified to do is to put at your disposal my translations of my material.  And I of course will continue with my work.  There is a great deal of material unexamined."

Dekelkert roused himself.  "In any case, it is necessary to call a council of the Servants.  Prepare yourself to present the matter to the full council in camera.  They will want more material evidence than you have given me, so make sure you have it at your fingertips.  Gerwapkert, my secretary, will help you with your preparation and materials.  Prepare a list of authorities you have consulted on matters outside your own expertise."  Futhmop signified obedience, as he was bound to.  Dekelkert reached for his communicator.

"To begin with, let's contact my counterpart in the Eastern region."  Although the Eastern Servant's office was on the opposite side of the planet, Servants' offices never slept. Dekelkert immediately flared his jowls into the formal display appropriate to congress between dominant equals. 

He specified the connection.  The response was unprecedented: "No connection possible". 

The Servant of the Region blinked at the message for a moment, then shifted to a high-security emergency channel.  Again: "No connection possible".  Unnerved by the morning's events, he used improper language, rattled his tails, and tried again. . .  and again. . .