123 ::: Galactics

The Tandu-Soro detachment was gaining on the strung out fugitives.

"Mistress, a crippled Thennanin is approaching the transfer point on an escape trajectory."

Krat squirmed on her cushion and snarled. "So? Casualties have left the battle area before. All sides try to evacuate their wounded. Why do you bother me when we are even now closing in!"

The little Pila detector officer scuttled back into its cubbyhole. Krat bent to watch her forward screens.

A small squadron of Thennanin struggled to keep ahead. Further on, at the edge of detection, sparks of desultory battle showed that the leaders were still bickering, even as they closed on the quarry.

What if they're mistaken, Krat wondered. We chase the Thennanin, who chase the remnants, who chase what? Those fools might even be chasing each other!

It didn't matter. Half the Tandu-Soro fleet orbited Kithrup, so the Earthlings were trapped, one way or another.

We'll deal with the Tandu in good time, she thought, and meet the ancient ones alone.

"Mistress!" the Pila shouted shrilly. "There is a transmission from the transfer point!"

"Bother me one more time with inconsequentials…" she rumbled, flexing her mating claw threateningly. But the client interrupted her! The Pil dared to interrupt!

"Mistress. It is the Earth ship! They taunt us! They defy us! They…"

"Show me!" Krat hissed. "It must be a trick! Show me at once!"

The Pil ducked back into its section. On Krat's main screen appeared the holo image of a man, and several dolphins. From the man's shape, Krat could tell it was a female, probably their leader.

"…stupid creatures unworthy of the name 'sophonts.' Foolish, pre-sentient upspring of errant masters. We slip away from all your armed might, laughing at your clumsiness! We slip away as we always will, you pathetic creatures. And now that we have a real head start, you'll never catch us! What better proof that the Progenitors favor not you, but us! What better proof…"

The taunt went on. Krat listened, enraged, yet at the same time savoring the artistry of it. These men are better than I'd thought. Their insults are wordy and overblown, but they have talent. They deserve honorable, slow deaths.

"Mistress! The Tandu with us are changing course! Their other ships are leaving Kithrup for the transfer point!"

Krat hissed in despair. "After them! After them at once! We followed them through space this far. The chase only goes on!"

The crew bent to their tasks resignedly. The Earth ship was in a good position to escape. Even at best this would be a long chase.

Krat realized that she would never make it home in time for mating. She would die out here.

On her screen, the man continued to taunt them.

"Librarian!" she called. "I do not understand some of the man's words. Find out what that phrase — Nyaahh nyaaah — means in their beastly wolfling tongue!"

124 ::: Tom Orley

Cross-legged on a woven mat of reeds, shaded by a floating wreck, he listened as a muttering volcano slowly sputtered into silence. Contemplating starvation, he listened to the soft, wet sounds of the endless weedscape, and found in them a homely beauty. The squishy, random rhythms blended into a backdrop for his meditation.

On the mat in front of him, like a focus mandala, lay the message bomb he had never set off. The container glistened in the sunlight of north Kithrup's first fine day in weeks. Highlights shone in dimpled places where the metal had been battered, as he had been. The dented surface gleamed still.

Where are you now?

The subsurface sea-waves made his platform undulate gently. He floated in a trance through levels of awareness, like an old man poking idly through his attic, like an old-time hobo looking with mild curiosity through the slats of a moving boxcar.

Where are you now, my love?

He recalled a Japanese haiku from the eighteenth century, by the great poet Yosa Buson.

As the spring rains fall,

Soaking in them, on the roof,

Is a child's rag ball.

Watching blank images in the dents on the psi-globe, he listened to the creaking of the flat jungle — its skittering little animal sounds — the wind riffling through the wet, flat leaves.

Where is that part of me that has departed?

He listened to the slow pulse of a world ocean, watched patterns in the metal, and after a while, in the reflections in the dents and creases, an image came to him.

A blunt, bulky, wedge shape approached a place that was a not-place, a shining blackness in space. As he watched, the bulky thing cracked open. The thick carapace slowly split apart, like a hatching egg. The shards fell away, and there remained a slender nubbed cylinder, looking a bit like a caterpillar. Around it glowed a nimbus, a thickening shell of probability that hardened even as he watched.

No illusion, he decided. It cannot be an illusion.

He opened himself to the image, accepting it. And from the caterpillar a thought winged to him.

Blossoms on the pear

and a woman in the moonlight

reads a letter there…

His slowly healing lips hurt as he smiled. It was another haiku by Buson. Her message was as unambiguous as could be, under the circumstances. She had somehow picked up his trance-poem, and responded in kind.

"Jill…" he cast as hard as he could.

The caterpillar shape, sheathed in a cocoon of stasis, approached the great hole in space. It dropped forward toward the not-place, grew transparent as it fell, then vanished.

For a long time Tom sat very still, watching the highlights on the metal globe slowly shift as the morning passed.

Finally, he decided it wouldn't do him or the universe any harm if he started doing something about survival.

125 ::: The Skiff

"Between you two crazy males, have you come any closer to figuring out what he'sss talking about?"

Keepiru and Sah'ot just stared back at Hikahi. They turned back to their discussion without answering her, huddling with Creideiki, trying to interpret the captain's convoluted instructions.

Hikahi rolled her eyes and turned to Toshio. "You'd think they'd include me in these seances of theirs. After all, Creideiki and I are mates!"

Toshio shrugged. "Creideiki needs Sah'ot's language skill and Keepiru's ability as a pilot. But you saw their faces. They're halfway into the Whale Dream right now. We can't afford to have you that way while you're in command."

"Hmmmph." Hikahi spumed, only slightly mollified. "I suppose you've finished the inventory, Toshio?"

"Yes, sir." He nodded. "I have a written list ready. We're well enough stocked in consumables to last to the first transfer point, and at least one beyond that. Of course, we're in the middle of nowhere, so we'll need at least five transfer jumps to get anywhere near civilization. Our charts are pitifully inadequate, our drives will probably fail over the long haul, and few ships our size have even taken transfer points successfully. Aside from all that, and the cramped living quarters, I think we're all right."

Hikahi sighed. "We can't lose anything by trying. At leasst the Galactics are gone."

"Yeah," he agreed. "It was a nice stroke, Gillian taunting the Eatees from the transfer point. It let us know they got away, and got the Eatees off our backs."

"Don't say 'Eatees,' Toshio. It'ss not polite. You may offend some nice Kanten or Linten one day if you get into the habit."

Toshio swallowed and ducked his head. No matter where or when, no lieutenant had ever been known to slacken off on a middie. "Yes, sir," he said.