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.
-----------------------------------------------------------
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. . .
