“Better?.” he asked some time later. She bit him on the arm. It wasn’t the answer he had looked for, but he did not complain.
Fralk and Hogram let thunder wash over them as they watched the flood. A boulder the size of Hogram’s castle slammed into the side of Ervis Gorge. The ground quivered like the skin of a massi with an itch. “You propose to send our boat through that?” the domain master demanded, stabbing a fingerclaw at the chaos far below.
Invading the Omalo lands wasn’t my idea, Fralk wanted to say. He had too much sense to yield to temptation. Hogram appreciated frankness, but he did not appreciate males showing how clever they were at his expense.
“The flood is still new, clanfather,” the younger male said carefully, “and is sweeping along the debris that has accumulated in the gorge since last summer. It will grow calmer.”
“It had better,” Hogram snapped. He turned an eyestalk from the flood to Fralk. “How would that runnerpest in the toy boat you showed me have fared if you dropped half my roof on it, eh? That’s what the trash in the water will be doing to the boats trying to go across, isn’t it?”
“I suppose there may be a few accidents.”
“Accidents?” Hogram echoed. “Is that all you can say? Accidents? Can you be sure any of these boats”-the way he stressed the word emphasized that it was foreign-“will get across Ervis Gorge at all? Or will the folk far north of here, picking corpses from the gorge after the flood subsides, be surprised at how many foolish males got themselves killed in the water?”
Anger burst inside Fralk. “Clanfather, are you pulling in your eyestalks? If so, tell me plainly, so I can free the males who are building boats for more productive duty. I also suggest that you release your males from weapons training, if you do not intend to use us as warriors.”
After being so blunt, Fralk wondered whether Hogram would turn all eyestalks toward or away from him. How many males, he thought, could claim total rejection by their own domain master and his Omalo counterpart? It was not a distinction Fralk craved.
But Hogram, with the perspective age brings, was not infuriated by the younger male’s presumption. If he was amused, he was too canny to let his eyestalks show it. “We must press on,” he said. “Think of the profit wasted if we let that labor go for naught. But I still turn blue whenever I think of trusting myself to one of the contraptions those males are building.”
You won’t be in one of them, Fralk thought. But that was not something even he dared say aloud. Instead he answered, “Clanfather, we will succeed. The Skarmer will be the only great clan to straddle a flood gorge. One day, our domains will fill the eastern lands.”
Hogram’s eyestalks quivered now. “May you prove right. That day, however, is not one I will live to see, nor you, either. Worry about planting our first bud, not the ones that may spring from it.”
“As you say, clanfather.” No denying that Hogram made sense. But Fralk’s ambition ran further than he would admit to anyone, especially to the domain master, whose position only made his already suspicious nature more so. If Fralk established a new domain on the far side of Ervis Gorge, and if his descendants kept pushing back the Omalo and setting up new domains of their own, might they not eventually prefer to style themselves after their first domain master?
Great clan Fralk. The young male had repeated that to himself often enough, when he was sure no other male could hear. He liked the sound of it.
“Hello, Athena. Houston here.” Irv Levitt thumbed on the recorder. The mission controller back home would not pause for acknowledgment, not with back-and-forth transmission time near twenty minutes. Irv was about to go on about his business- most of what Houston had to say was Emmett Bragg’s problem, not his-when the controller, as if reading his mind, continued. “We have some new instructions for you, Irv.” His voice came in scratchy across the millions of miles but was perfectly understandable.
Now that the mission controller-his name was Jesse Dozier was talking to him, Irv said, “Me? What’s up?” just as if the man could hear him. Catching himself, the anthropologist laughed at his own foolishness.
He had only talked over a sentence or so, and that not directly relevant to him, or so he thought. “-continued excellent response to the assistance you folks gave the Soviets, both here and in the States and from around the world,” Dozier was saying. “Interest in the Minerva mission hasn’t been so high-or so favorable-since just after Athena touched down. The polls are running strongly for continued contact and exploration.”
Polls… Irv felt his mouth twist. He half wished polling had never been invented. These days, no politicians dared moved half an inch past what their polls told them. They followed so closely that most of them had forgotten how to lead.
Again Dozier’s words ran parallel to his thoughts. “We’re preparing to have the new appropriation submitted while things look so good. And to help nail it down, we It like to be able to show Congress another major success. That’s where you come in, Irv.”
Levitt blinked. “Me?”
Dozier, of course, took no notice. Irv shut up and listened.
“From the data you folks and Tsiolkovsky have sent back, it seems likely that the two groups in whose lands you find yourselves will soon be at war. We want you to arrange a radio hookup with the Soviets, so that the leader on your side of Jotun Canyon can confer with the ruler on the western side. Think what a feather in your caps it will be if you can mediate a dispute between rival factions of an alien species.
“Louise”-the mission controller changed the subject-“we have some new subroutines to speed up your number crunching.
First-”
“Dozier, you are stoned out of your gourd,” Irv said. Now he didn’t care if he missed some of the feed from Houston. He wished he hadn’t heard any of what Dozier had just finished saying. What did they think back home, that Reatur and the domain master across the canyon were a couple of Third World dictators, to be brought into line by threatening to cut off their weapons shipments?
“Sounds like it,” Emmett Bragg said when Irv, throwing his hands in the air for extra emphasis, shouted that question at him.
“But we don’t have anything like that kind of leverage on them,” Irv said, still loudly. “Tolmasov had it right-they were going to fight whether we were here or not. The other fellows want to cross, Reatur doesn’t want to let them. Where’s the room for discussion?”
“Good question.” Bragg laughed two syllables of a humorless laugh. “Maybe, if we’re real lucky, the Russians won’t cooperate. That’d get us off the hook.”
“Maybe.” Irv was as skeptical of that as Emmett sounded. The Russians spent even more time beating their breasts about how peace loving they were than the United States did. They would have to link-Hogram? Irv wasn’t sure he remembered the western chieftain’s name-up with Reatur, assuming Reatur was willing to talk… “Do you suppose Houston would let me beg off if I told them the domain master would feed me to the crows for bringing up the idea at all?”
“You could try, I suppose, but I don’t think it’ll fly. Trouble is, Houston already knows Reatur’s got an open mind, because if he didn’t, he’d never have gone along with your wife’s trying to save that female. If he’s game for that, chances are he’d be willing to talk peace, too.”
“You have this disgusting habit of being right.” Irv sighed. “Of course, just because he’ll talk doesn’t mean he’ll agree to anything. I wouldn’t, in his shoes.”
“Neither would I, not that he wears shoes. And somehow I don’t think the art of negotiation’s come as far here as it has back home. Which is to say that Reatur’s more likely to call the westerner every name in the book than talk turkey with him.” Bragg grinned crookedly. “Which is what you said a while ago.”