Jennifer wasn't sure whether the ear wiggling did any good. The Great One stopped just in front of her and bent his knees so his eyes were on a level with hers. Those eyes were not quite the jet-black of the eyes of a Foitan from Odern; they were a deep, deep green-blue, an intensification of the shade of the Great One's skin and pelt. The color would have been stunning in human eyes. Here, it was simply alien.
"We come in peace," Jennifer said, knowing the alien would not understand. She also realized it was barely true; they'd blasted their way into the tower, and a good-sized battle was going on just outside the Great Unknown's radius of insanity. For that matter, more than a few armed Foitani from Rof Golan were inside the radius of doom, even if at the moment they were in no state to use their weapons.
Greenberg held his hands in front of him, palms out. Many races used that gesture to show they had peaceful intentions. Jennifer tried to remember if she'd seen it among the Foitani from Odern. She didn't think so. As far as she could tell, though, Foitani in general didn't have peaceful intentions all that often.
The Great One kept studying Greenberg and her. A visual examination didn't seem to satisfy the alien. The Great One sniffed at them, too, with as little regard for their modesty as a dog would have given them. Jennifer wished she hadn't spent the last several hours sweating and terrified after the Foitani from Rof Golan attacked the research base of their cousins from Odern.
Finally, to her relief, the Great One straightened up. He spoke a few words into the air. Holovid pictures of alien races appeared in front of him, one after another, as if in a video collage. Jennifer recognized a couple of species, but most were strange to her. Then the Foitan spoke again. The cavalcade of images stopped?with a pair of humans hanging in midair before the Great One.
"That's impossible," Jennifer whispered to Greenberg.
"Maybe not," he whispered back. "I've heard it claimed in traders' bars that the Foitani made it all the way to Earth. I never thought it was anything but a bar story, though."
The humans in the holovid display?a man and a woman?were a lot grimier than Jennifer had worried about being. They wore furs. The man carried a wooden spear with a stone point attached with sinews. The woman clutched a stone knife, or it might have been a scraper. They both looked scared to death.
The Great One examined them carefully as he had Jennifer and Greenberg. He even sniffed them in the same way, as if to confirm by another sense that they were of the same type. That puzzled Jennifer. Could a holovid come with a scent attachment? She supposed so, for a race with a sense of smell more sensitive than humanity's. On the other hand?
"Bernard," she whispered, "do you think those poor cave people could somehow still be alive in here?"
He started to shake his head, then stopped. "I don't know," he said slowly. "The Foitan sure seems to be. After that, all bets are off."
Jennifer wondered if the tower was some kind of Foitani museum?or zoo. At first, no doubt because she'd seen the two humans, the idea was horrifying. Then she remembered the notion she'd had the first time she came up to the tower, of countless aliens going in and never coming out. Imagining a museum or zoo was a lot more comfortable than thinking about?what was the Middle English expression? A Final Solution, that was it.
The Foitan spoke to the air again. The humans it had called up disappeared once more, whether back into data storage or storage of a more literal sort. The Great One gave Jennifer and Greenberg another once-over. He bared his teeth at them in a Foitani frown. "Wondering what we're doing here," Greenberg guessed.
"I'll bet you're right," Jennifer said. "Earth is a long, long way from Gilver. What are the odds of cave people ending up here on their own and on the loose?" Something else occurred to her. "I wonder if the Foitan knows he's been here twenty-eight thousand years."
Greenberg hissed. "That's a real good question. I wish I had a real good answer."
"I wish I did, too."
The Foitan came out of his study. He walked over to the far wall of the chamber and rapped on it. This time it wasn't a door that opened, only a drawer-sized space. The Great One reached in, pulled something out, pointed it at Jennifer and Greenberg. By the way he handled it, the object was obviously a weapon.
"Oh, shit," Greenberg said softly. "Whether it's twenty-eight thousand years or day before yesterday, the breed doesn't seem to have changed much some ways, does it? Oh, shit," he repeated.
Jennifer would have looked for better last words than that. But the Great One seemed to have second thoughts. Instead of firing, he gestured with the weapon. "I'm tired of being ordered around by Foitani," Jennifer said. With very little choice, however, she went down the hall in the direction the Great One indicated.
After about twenty meters, the Foitan stopped her and Greenberg. Another rap on the wall produced another doorway. The Great One ordered the humans into the new chamber. It reminded Jennifer of nothing so much as the library setup back on Odern: it was full of strange-looking holovid gear and computer equipment. Greenberg found another name for it. "Command post," he said.
His proved the better guess. The Great One said something. A bank of screens came to life: the view immediately around the tower at ground level. More than one screen showed gray-blue Foitani from Rof Golan pressed up against the side of the building. Some still carried the arms they had brought to Gilver to use against the Foitani from Odern. All of them, armed or not, had the lost-soul look of Foitani under the influence of the Great Unknown.
The Great One had seemed almost godlike in competence and confidence. Now for the first time Jennifer saw him discomfited. He stared at his Rof Golani umpty-greatgrandscions as if he could not believe, did not want to believe, his eyes. She wondered what the Great One thought of those distorted versions of himself, versions made all the more grotesque by their obvious insanity.
At a shouted command, the Great One shifted to a view that had to have come from the top of the tower. Far off in the distance, Jennifer saw the spaceport by the research base of the Foitani from Odern. She also saw atmospheric fliers, tiny specks in the screen, diving to attack the base.
One exploded in midair. The burst of light drew the Great One's notice. The magnification of the pickup increased. Now small-arms flashes were plainly visible. Jennifer tried to figure out what was going on. The Foitani from Odern?her Foitani?seemed to have established a defensive perimeter against their distant cousins from Rof Golan. As she watched, a missile streaked out from the base to blow up a Rof Golani armored vehicle.
The Great One watched, too?in horror, if Jennifer was any judge. When the Foitan spoke again, alarms started yammering. Alarm ran through Jennifer, as well. Not so long ago, she'd scoffingly suggested to Pawasar Pawasar Ras that the tower might be full of armed Great Ones waiting to get loose. Now she didn't feel like scoffing any more.
Her own personal Great One didn't wait for any of his hypothetical relatives to arrive. Another wave of his weapon sent Jennifer and Greenberg back down the hall the way they had come. He marched them past the chamber in which they'd found him, all the way to the end of the corridor. An offhand, almost contemptuous rap on the wall produced the doorway Greenberg had found after so much effort. The Great One's weapon ordered the humans back into the room by way of which they'd entered the tower.
The Great One looked at the outer wall. Jennifer wondered if he saw it smooth and unblemished or if he could tell the hole from the shaped charge was there. Pieces of stone from the explosion still littered the floor. If the Great One saw that wall as being smooth and unblemished, he'd have the devil's own time figuring out how the broken rock got there.