"Oh, dear." Jennifer swallowed a giggle.

"If you weren't my friend… Well, these Foi-whatevers look big enough to have you for breakfast instead of talking, if that's what they want. Maybe you should keep your door locked after all."

"Don't be silly, Ella. Go back to Xavier, and I hope nobody interrupts you any more."

"Better not," Ella said darkly. "Good-bye." As it was the first one she'd got in three calls, Jennifer cherished that good-bye. She went back to work on the essay, hoping to finish grading it before the Foitani arrived.

A few minutes later, the elevator down the hall beeped. The Foitani, Jennifer thought. She put aside the paper; maybe it was never going to get finished. As it went back onto the pile, her brows came together. To get into the building this late, you were supposed to have an authorization card for the elevator to read. Then she shrugged. Maybe the Foitani had ridden up with someone who had a card. They knew her name, after all; a little explaining would be all they'd need.

Someone knocked on the door?knocked so high up on the door that it could only have been a battleball centerliner or a Foitan. She hadn't heard footsteps in the hall, but then the Foitani didn't wear shoes. They were very smooth and quiet for beings so large, as if they were closer to their hunting ancestors than humans were.

Jennifer opened the door and looked up and up. Thegun Thegun Nug towered over her; behind him stood the other two Foitani. Close up, they really were intimidating. Without intending to, she took half a step back before she said, "Hello. What can I do for you this evening?"

"You can come with us," Thegun Thegun Nug said.

The flat tone of his translator made Jennifer unsure just how he meant that. "I'd sooner talk here," she answered.

"It was not a conditional request," Thegun Thegun Nug said. Only then did she notice he held something in his left hand; anthropocentrism made her automatically look toward the right first.

The something sparked. That was all Jennifer remembered for a long time.

When she woke up, she was on a starship. The realization filtered in little by little, with her returning consciousness. Perhaps it took longer than it should have, for she had a headache like a thousand years of hangovers boiled down into a liter. Her trading stunner would quietly put a person out for an hour or two and leave her feeling fine when she woke up. Whatever the Foitani used didn't work that way. Oh my, no. The first time she tried to sit up, her head felt as if it would fall off. She rather wished it would, so she could forget it for a while.

After a bit, she began to notice things other than her pounding skull. The gravity was a good deal higher than Saugus's comfortable.85. It wasn't a planet's g-field, either. She didn't know how she knew the difference?no star traveler had ever succeeded in putting it into words?but she knew. The air was more than conditioned; it had the perfect flatness a good recycling plant gives.

Everything pointed to its being a Foitani ship, too. The chamber that held her was bigger and had a higher ceiling than humans were likely to build. Even the plain, foam pad on which she lay was outsized. The light from the ceiling panel had an oranger cast than humans would have used.

She looked around; she had to close her eyes several times at the pain that turning her head cost her. But for the bare mattress, the only things in the chamber with her were three plastic trash bags. She crawled over to them, moving slowly and carefully because of both the higher gravity and her headache. The trash bags held everything she'd had at her office, from her toothbrush to her computer to the complete contents of her desk, right down to paper clips and small change.

With a gasp of delight, she found her stunner. The delight quickly disappeared. Given that she was on a Foitani ship which she had no idea how to fly, how much good was the stunner likely to do her? She would have traded it in an instant for a year's supply of tampons. Since no one appeared with the trade offer, she clipped the stunner onto her belt.

Then she looked around for a place to relieve herself. Somehow, no one in her Middle English novels ever worried much about that. Neither had she, until she went on her first trading run. Squatting in the bushes brought her down to basic reality in a hurry.

She picked the corner farthest away from the foam-rubber mat. If the Foitani didn't come in and give her somewhere better to go before she had to empty her bladder, they could clean up after her themselves.

She was uncomfortable but not yet urgent when a door appeared in the far wall of her chamber: one second it wasn't there, the next second it was. Thegun Thegun Nug stepped inside. Of itself, her hand reached for her stunner. "That will do you no good," the Foitan said.

Suddenly she wasn't so sure. Maybe she couldn't fly this ship herself, but if she knocked Thegun Thegun Nug out and threatened to start carving him into strips a centimeter wide, his henchbeings might be persuaded to turn around and take her back to Saugus. Since that was the best notion she had, she pressed the trigger button.

Thegun Thegun Nug bared his teeth, but uncooperatively refused to fall over in a large, blue heap. "I said that would do you no good," he told her. "Your weapon makes me itch, but it does not make me sleep. Foitani stunners use a different ray."

Jennifer's gonging head gave anguished testimony to the truth of that. Back to her next priority, then. "Take me to whatever you people use for a toilet."

Thegun Thegun Nug took her. He even walked out of the room and left her alone. "My folk do not require privacy for this function, but we have learned humans prefer it." The door in the wall did not disappear, though.

"Thank you so much," Jennifer said, acid in her voice. "Why couldn't you have left me with my privacy back on Saugus, instead of kidnapping me?"

Her sarcasm rolled off Thegun Thegun Nug's blue skin. Through the opening in the wall, he answered, "You are welcome. And you would not have come with us of your own free will from the world you call Saugus; you were content there. But we have need of you, have need of your knowledge. Thus we took you."

"Thanks a lot," Jennifer muttered. The sanitary arrangements were simple enough: a couple of round holes in the floor, each close to half a meter wide. She squatted over one of them. When she was done, she called Thegun Thegun Nug, "Do you have anything I can use to wipe myself clean? Something soft and absorbent, I hope."

"I will see," the Foitan answered after a moment. "My species' orifices do not have this difficulty." Now the doorway vanished. The Foitan stayed away for a quarter of an hour. When he returned, he brought a length of gauzy cloth. "This is from our first-aid kit. Use it sparingly. It is all we can afford to give you."

"How long will the flight be?" she asked. Thegun Thegun Nug did not answer. She tried another string of questions. "What do you mean, you have need of my knowledge? How do you know what I know? And what kind of good is the knowledge of a professor of Middle English to you, anyhow?"

Thegun Thegun Nug chose to respond to one of those questions. "You were recommended to us by another human."

That only created more confusion for Jennifer. "I was? By whom?"

"By one with whom we have worked. He came across a situation beyond his expertise, and suggested you were the one to employ. From all we have seen of you, the probability that he is correct seems, if not high, then at least significant. He will also give you such aid as he may: he is still within Odern space."

"Odern?" The translator had left the word unchanged.

"Odern is my planet," Thegun Thegun Nug said. "It is one of the 127 worlds within our former sphere that still support Foitani life, one of the nineteen where starflight has been rediscovered. Before the Suicide Wars," he added, "we had settled on several thousand worlds; the precise number is still a matter of dispute among our scholars."