“I agree.” Betsy threw up her hands. “This whole thing makes no sense. Especially the business with the wings. To N’Ferrans, their wings are everything! They’re for status, display, to keep the rain off—even if they’re too old to fly any more, like Asa. Why would the Ruling Council want to take Asa’s wings?”
“To humble him,” Charlie said bluntly. “But as important as Scholar Asayana is to you, Betsy, it’s more important that the N’Ferran Ruling Council would openly attempt to shame him in this fashion. As it stands, I’m sure that the veffen-making ceremony, and your open invitation to it through Asayana, is not what it seems. I’m betting that all of Asayana’s current problems have something to do with this ceremony, too.”
“Isn’t that a bit of a reach?” Betsy asked. “Asa’s in trouble, yes, and they’re about to have a veffen-making ceremony, yes… and they’ve invited me, yes… but—”
“There’s too many coincidences here to suit me,” Charlie said. “Please, for the love of God and little green applies, don’t go!”
“I have to,” she said quietly. “It’s a diplomatic function. Plus, Scholar Asa invited me. Why would he invite me to something that might be dangerous?”
“And he’d request asylum if he wasn’t in danger himself?” Charlie pointed out with remorseless logic. “Come on! You know Asayana. He’s never evinced a wish to travel off-planet. So why would he request asylum now, knowing the only way to grant his wish, providing we can even find him to do so, is to put him on a ship bound for Earth… which might kill him at his age!”
“He’s only seventy, or thereabouts,” Betsy argued.
“And none of his people—not one of them—have ever traveled off-planet. No one has any idea if the drugs we use to endure deep space will work on a N’Ferran, much less one of his advanced age. Much less the fact that he may not be able to tolerate the additional gravity to break for space… Asayana has to know this.”
“He should, yes,” she agreed. “He’s a scholar, and they collect what we might call ‘useless knowledge.’ You know they stay exempt from politics, which is why this is so bizarre… Asa sees me as being like him.”
“Someone who’s getting to know the N’Ferran culture for its own sake definitely would be viewed as a scholar.” Charlie stated the obvious, but his eyes told her something else. “Tell me everything he said at your last meeting.”
So Betsy went over it all. Again.
Charlie listened impassively. “Let’s assume we do find Asayana. Can you grant him asylum?”
“I think so.” She frowned. “It will anger the N’Ferran Ruling Council, but when we landed here, we insisted that if anyone ever wished for asylum, we must grant it. That’s the main reason we are only allowed to have six Terrans at the Embassy at any given time.”
“Yes, and we’re all supposedly scholars, too.” Charlie snorted. “Though what we’re studying is definitely up for debate.”
“We’re studying the N’Ferrans. They’re studying us, or at least the Fearless Ones are… I’ve never really believed the Ruling Council cared one way or the other about us, aside from drinking their veffen and making some hefty profits. So why start now?”
Charlie’s blue eyes bored into hers. “What do you know about veffen?”
“Other than it’s a really good drink?” Betsy asked. “It’s high in certain trace elements, along with folate and some flavonoids—”
Charlie interrupted. “And small N’Ferrans—egglings, even—need to drink at least a little veffen in order to survive.”
“I didn’t know that,” she admitted. “Asa said that veffen saved N’Ferra once, when I asked him. But he couldn’t tell me why.”
Charlie drummed his hands against the wooden desk. “My hunch is that veffen, like human dark beers, allows calcium to better bind to bones. And that it works even better for the N’Ferrans than it does for us.”
Betsy frowned, a twitch of her lips. “Maybe… maybe we need to think about how the veffen is fertilized. They seem to do it only as a ceremony with many honored guests among the N’Ferran elite–”
“—And there must be a reason for that,” Charlie finished. “We’ve never been told what it is. Yet now, after how many years of secrecy, they’re willing to show us? There’s something wrong with that, Betsy!”
“I’ve been here ten years,” Betsy said quietly. She’d been on N’Ferra twice as long as Charlie, who’d been among the second batch of humans to make the nascent Terran Embassy a going concern. “And they continually rebuffed me—even Asa, who has said he’d be glad to tell if it were allowed. But I think he’d lose his status as a Fearless One—”
“Which he’s about to lose anyway if my sources are correct,” Charlie put in.
“They’ve always been willing to share their veffen, at least in small amounts,” Betsy said, thinking aloud. “If it’s as necessary to their culture as you think it is—”
“I’ll put out some more feelers,” Charlie promised. “When, exactly, is this ceremony?”
“The second of Dalgarsh, which is… eight days from now?”
“Eight 14.8 hour days… that doesn’t give us much time. I’ll ask Stan if he’s willing to do some legwork.”
Betsy knew Stanley Driscoll, the Terran Embassy’s science specialist, quite well. An older Terran, he was passionately interested in everything concerned with avian biology and had actually come out of retirement to study the N’Ferrans. So if anyone could find out what the N’Ferrans actually needed the veffen to do for them, Stan would be the man.
“He’ll have to get over the N’Ferrans use of his full first name, too,” Betsy said dryly. “I know Stanley sounds strange—”
“But they like it, and that’s what they’re going to call him, nyah!”
They laughed, but without humor.
“For now, I’m going to pretend that Scholar Asa did not request asylum and continue to try to find him,” Betsy murmured. “I’ll be the misdirection, while you and Stan try to figure out what’s going on.”
Another four days passed before Stan Driscoll walked into Betsy’s public office. He waved triumphantly, then walked upstairs to her inner sanctum. She quickly disengaged from a few Terran tourists (visiting the embassy for the locations of bars that catered to human stomachs along with the ubiquitous veffen) and followed.
Stan wasted no time. “At the veffen-making ceremony, I’ve heard that the N’Ferrans give chapter and verse as to how, exactly, veffen is so important to them.”
“Did you find someone willing to talk with you right now, though?” Betsy asked as she took her seat behind her desk. “And should we wait for Charlie?”
“He’s got a lead as to where Asayana is, so I’d guess not,” Stan said. “And no, I couldn’t get anyone to talk directly. But I did confirm your hunch that veffen helps the N’Ferrans, biologically—did you know that N’Ferran bones are abnormally brittle due to past radioactivity?”
“The crust of N’Ferra has some abnormalities, I’d read—”
“Exactly, and that’s why the Ruling Council distrusts our technology, as they equate it, I’m sorry, with radiation.” Stan shook his white-haired head.
A deep bong rang out, which meant one of the other Embassy staffers had need of her, immediately. Betsy went to the glass plate and saw Charlie… alone. Something about his expression made her stomach drop.