THE youthful sparkle of Evan’s eyes was gone, replaced by fiery resolve. “The embassy resources had nothing. I—I claimed a family emergency and left Dokeci-Na that night. I knew I had to hurry. M’Lean won’t agree to breaching the Elves’ city, or any drastic action, without more information—especially from our own experts—but the Dokeci? If there are more fatalities?” He rolled his shoulders as if they ached. “I hope I’m wrong, Esen. I probably am. But I have to be sure. That’s why I came to the Library.”
Which, in my opinion, was adult and most responsible of Evan, if you didn’t count a reckless willingness to throw away his cherished career to satisfy his personal moral code. I’d my own regrettable tendencies, of course. His description of the Elves, of their shelter-city, were so tantalizingly new I had to remind myself of the seriousness of the situation. It’s not all about you, was how Skalet would put it.
Still. New species! New me!
Once I could assimilate their genetic material. A wee bite of something left lying about would do; Web-beings weren’t fussy. Except for Lesy, but then Ersh presorted—the point being I’d a perfect opportunity in front of me if only Evan had brushed against one. He might have collected skin cells. Even better, a hair follicle; he’d said Elves were hairless, few noticed the wealth of little sensory hairs along the arms of most humanoids.
“So you didn’t get to meet one,” I grumbled, possibly projecting my own disappointment.
“No.” Evan sipped a fresh cup of tea, the other vanishing as he’d lost himself in the story. I’d slipped the sandwich plate back on the table, pleased to see him take bites; I doubted he tasted any of it. “The Dokeci told us the Elves have stopped communicating with them.” He winced. “Other than the screams. The bodies.”
Unpleasant business, that. I liked it no better as a Lanivarian, despite being a species who howled their grief. The bodies themselves were . . . problematic. Queeb held no reverence for anyone’s deceased and—historically—ate their own. Rumor held they’d never stopped, merely taken the practice somewhere without squeamish alien observers. There was no end of variations, really. In my informed opinion, these Dokeci—for in this case we did appear to have a separated group, most probably engineers—were overly quick to assume the presentation of corpses was a plea.
The Elves might have been sharing.
These Dokeci’s communication skills with another, more familiar species didn’t impress me either. “They should have told their Human employees about the attacks,” I said. “They deserved the truth.”
“Maybe.” He looked at me, face grim. “Any other species would have blamed Burtles and his crew for those deaths. They avoided an interspecies’ incident.”
“They avoided sharing the Elves,” I grumbled, but Evan was correct. Revenge, petty or otherwise, wasn’t in the Dokeci mind-set. Penance for failure to predict a problem, however, was; I suspected several individual Dokeci were about to lose their status, including this Ekwueme-ki. If they hadn’t already.
Families would fragment.
A paralyzing scramble to prevent exactly that would be underway as we sat here. Dokeci facing loss of status would go to any lengths to dilute the decision-making process, involving as many as possible, explaining why Ekwueme-ki had invited the Humans in the first place.
The charitable view held all involved would have their say in what would be a very important choice.
Other Dokeci, knowing better, would avoid becoming entangled with equal determination. The notion was to muddy accountability and spread blame. Ersh-memory supplied the phrase: the more arms hold a burden, the easier to slip yours away. A tactic I’d noticed employed with enthusiasm in the Hamlet of Hillsview council.
Both were true. The system worked for the Dokeci, at its best preventing, at the worst delaying, completely rash decisions.
My friend here would learn all this and more, granted he still had a job. Poor Evan. His talent for getting into trouble rivaled mine. Not that I did so as often, I assured myself, choosing to ignore recent events.
What mattered to us now? Unless things changed dramatically, any Dokeci action dealing with the Elves should grind to a sputtering halt.
Leaving the Human embassy staff—who, depending on their awareness of Dokeci and personal ambition, never to be discounted in the species, could seize initiative. Oh, dear.
The Human with me shifted impatiently. “I have to access the Library again, Esen.” He looked around, then back to me, not hiding his doubt. “Can it be done from here?”
Yes, but he didn’t need to know that. Evan Gooseberry also didn’t need to know the Library couldn’t help him any more than it had.
Yet. “Paul will let us know when the Library settles,” I said vaguely. “Finish your lunch.”
He pushed the plate away, gently but firmly.
Stubborn Human. Fortunately, I’d no shame. “What did you say the Dokeci called the pests?”
“Rasnir-as.”
His pronunciation wasn’t bad, stuck as he was with the limitations of a Human mouth. “The ‘devils-that-stab,’” I translated glibly. “More commonly? Devil Darts.”
“How—the embassy bank—I couldn’t find the meaning.” Evan looked decidedly put out.
“All Species’ Library of Linguistics and Culture.” I grinned at him. “Curator, remember?”
Though this memory was mine, not as yet added to the collection.
As a Dokeci, Lesy—Riosolesy-ki—exhibited a peculiar form of courage. She loved their scarier stories, so long as I’d sit with her to listen and we could hide under blankets. Among the darker figures in those stories were the Rasnir-as, mysterious unseen devils who’d sneak up on youth who weren’t being useful to their elders and stab them in their pendulous nethers with darts.
The youths, that is, though elders had far more hanging down there.
A youth myself, I took exception to the bit where those darts were dipped in concentrated enzymes derived from the otherwise innocuous Purple Wobblies, supposedly so the victim would be digested from the inside out over several excruciating days. These weren’t the cautionary tales of, say Humans; adult Dokeci hardly acknowledged their young existed, let alone told them stories.
Pure “grumpy elder” wish fulfillment, that’s what it was. I should know, living with Ersh. The stories I could—
Which wasn’t the point either. “Devil Darts are terrifying villains who appear in the Dokeci version of Human campfire stories,” I explained to Evan.
Who looked baffled. “Campfire?”
About to explain, I stopped myself. As Paul would explain to me, there could be such a thing as too much information.
“Mythical monsters,” I abbreviated. “Except that these are real.”
He swallowed hard, as though his lunch no longer sat well. “I didn’t get a good look—didn’t want one. It fit in a bag.” Evan held his hands apart, not more than the width of his body.
Size didn’t matter. As Ersh would say, every living thing had others to eat it.
Except Web-beings, who ate one another. I supposed being our own sole predator was at least tidy.
But what it said about the chasm between everything biological and us, who were closer to cosmic radiation and stellar dust than wonderful, messy, interconnected life? Who measured time in epochs instead of breaths?
Who, having once assimilated living thinking tissue, were forever forced to rely on it, or become mindless once more—
I wasn’t Ersh, to enjoy a cold philosophical debate about who and what we were, compared to ephemerals. I was only Esen-alit-Quar, who had a friend.
Paul, first and best.
And, maybe one day, this worried Human before me.
Who wasn’t, to my chagrin, easily distracted. Like Paul. “We need to go, Esen. I’ve more questions than time—I trust you’ve a translight com? To reach Polit M’Lean—if I find out he’s wrong, that is—” Evan’s face was so delightfully transparent, I could see his concern shift from the Elves to his own future, then back again, with a determined, “Or not. There must be answers. I don’t even know why the Darts who bit the Dokeci died.”
“Happens all the time,” I assured him. One being’s meat, another being’s poison was a truism of interplanetary travel and a significant problem for restaurants. I put my paws on the table. “I’ve a question for you, Evan Gooseberry,” I told him. “Nothing you’ve said explains why you think the Dokeci and your superiors are wrong about the Elves.”
“They told me.”
A tendency of my Lishcyn-self was to circle around a point as long as possible; now I fully appreciated how Paul felt when I did. If not how he resisted the urge to yell at me for it. “Go on.”
“Not that they told me,” Evan said, which didn’t help. “I—I know what paralyzing fear is, Esen. What it looks like. How beings show it. When the Elves’ home was falling apart under them—they found a way to survive. Despite the most rudimentary communication with the Dokeci, the Elves understood they were being rescued and cooperated, pulling their population deep inside the shelter-city, letting the Dokeci send in instruments and equipment to keep them alive. They come to Dokeci-Na and, at first, willingly walked outside on a different planet. Interacted. Learned some comspeak. They’re—their actions—” he qualified carefully, winning my approval, “—were pragmatic and even positive until the Devil Darts attacked the Dokeci. When the Dokeci died, the Elves fled into their city and sealed all the doors.”
But it hadn’t been only the Dokeci who’d died, I thought. Devil Darts had, too. “Wait. That wasn’t all that happened, Evan. You told me Burtles claimed the Dokeci were ‘pumping poison.’ You saw it for yourself. Be precise.”
Lives could depend on it.
This was an intelligent being, who appreciated what I asked and why. Evan took his time and concentrated before he spoke. “According to the briefing, the Dokeci took three steps after the attacks. They donned enviro-suits when approaching the Elves’ city. The Elves had seen these before and weren’t alarmed. The Dokeci created a circular perimeter at a distance from the city to keep any Darts from escaping by sinking warn-offs below the soil—do you know what those are?”
I nodded. Tech to send pulses of high frequency sound outward, at levels that dissuaded a high percentage of organisms possessed of nervous systems to turn around. Quickly.
“They demonstrated a warn-off to the Elves first. When they didn’t react, the Dokeci went ahead.”
I growled. “A lack of response isn’t agreement.”
“The Dokeci acknowledged that, but what choice did they have? They faced a deadly threat and worse, the first dead Elf was brought out of the city. The Dokeci took this to mean the Devil Darts had been driven beneath the city and were attacking its inhabitants.” Evan tapped the table three times. “Latest and last was the spray we saw being reapplied to the ground around the city. Hom Burtles assumed it was poison. We were told—” with self-conscious clarity, “—it was a passive restraint, a glue to prevent another Devil Dart from breaking through. The Dokeci offered to apply it within the city.” A sober look.
Ah. “That’s when the Elves sealed themselves away.”
“That’s when they panicked,” Evan corrected. “According to Polit M’Lean, Ekwueme-ki said the Elves who’d been doing their calm best to understand the Dokeci grabbed one another, then turned and ran. Within moments, every opening into the city was plugged. Since then, they scream and only come out to bring their dead. That,” he finished with profound sadness, “is fear.”
Maybe.
While I wasn’t ready to fall in with Evan’s view of events, I did agree with his doubt. Something wasn’t right.
Plus, time to meet some Elves!
I stood on my tail, so it wouldn’t wag. “Evan,” I began in my best, serious tone. “I know exactly what to do.”
He looked up at me with sudden hope. “What?”
“Field trip.”
Hope shifted to a wary confusion I found quite familiar. Did Humans practice it? “I don’t see how—”
“Under extraordinary circumstances, the collection can be accessed off-site. By myself. Leave all the details to me,” I offered loftily. I, in turn, would leave them to my web-kin, who enjoyed reminding me she had starships at her disposal. “We’ll . . .”
What was that?
I cocked my large ears for what had disturbed me. It came again, louder. A rustle-sssslide from overhead. Evan and I looked up at the same time.
“How big does a mousel get?”
“Not that big,” I answered, only half paying attention. The sounds came from Paul’s room, in the loft.
I’d have smelled him arriving.
Unless it wasn’t him. I sniffed deeply. Among the delights of the kitchen was an abundance of odors, some I enjoyed more than Paul, and vice versa; more came on the still-damp breeze through the window screen. There were, under all that, the aromas of our life here.
Then there was Evan, with his distinct ripe of anxious, tired, and not-very-clean Human. Clouds of it. Enough to mask anyone else. I frowned distractedly at him. “Stay here.”
I dropped to all fours, ignoring his scandalized gasp—yes, Lanivarians didn’t do such things—and padded noiselessly into the hallway.
The farmhouse was divided into four rooms on this level: in order of size, the kitchen, my quarters, the accommodation—which was as properly modern and comfortable as money could buy, given the amount of hair I shed in several forms—and the cramped corner space the Ragems fondly named the “pantry.” The pantry did contain shelves for food and hooks for coats, but mostly it was where a steep narrow staircase led into the stone-walled basement I refused to enter, and a steeper, narrower staircase led up to the loft and Paul’s private place.
Where I didn’t go.
That being the definition of “private” he’d patiently drilled into whatever head I had.
Paul would share living quarters, just not his own. He’d move into his partner’s of the time. When he’d contracted with Char Largas and they’d raised their twins together, it had been with that understanding. Though Char would also disappear onto her starship regularly, so the twins would come to me.
I missed babysitting. Though it was one of those odd Human activities where the sitting part, when they were very young, was mostly running after them. They were also very fast. Faster than me. Then came the blissful phase with sitting, Luara and Tomas sharing my generous Lishcyn lap for a story or treat. Which ended too soon, and I was back to running after—only by then they had friends and weren’t interested in me—
I swallowed a whine and focused on olfaction.
Two had used Paul’s stairs, so recently their scent had warmth as well as shape. An Ervickian and—
Lowering my head, I let myself SNARL silently, lips rippling over my fangs.
Janet Chase.
I put a paw on the first step, so consumed with fury I completely forgot my promise to Paul never to enter his private place—
Which is how a Carasian was able to sneak up on me in the pantry.