The herbivorous Indowy, normally a bit shy around even the Indowy-raised humans they knew personally, tended to be calmed by the environment. This despite thousands of years living, by preference, in closely packed warrens of their own kind. The decor smoothed her working relationships. Darhel would have hated it, of course, so when she met with one of them it was always elsewhere. Which suited her just fine, since from childhood she had absorbed a very Indowy attitude towards Darhel. It was not so much that the Indowy feared the Darhel. The Darhel did, after all, serve a useful purpose in Galactic civilization. Each race had its role.
But then, so did the flies that infest a dung heap.
Which brought her back to her apprentice. A young Indowy, he was beginning to embrace the theoretical underpinnings of advanced Sohon. He was also beginning to appreciate the difference between knowing and doing, as he moved on from childhood training projects to his first adult working team.
She looked at the raw Galplas, or what was supposed to be raw Galplas, that had coalesced in the center of the tank, before reaching in with a simple ceramic strainer to lift it out. One of the things she had fashioned for herself when she first began teaching was a stainless steel hammer. Such a primitive tool tended to convey a point indelibly. She appraised the unpleasant mass, choosing her spot. One sharp rap reduced the stuff to rubble and dust.
“On Earth, they call that chalk,” she said. “Now, why did the polymeric binding fail in the third stage of processing, and as a consequence, what is the present imbalance in your tank’s raw materials? Neglecting the tank fluid and nannites that dripped off your… chalk… how much of which substances will you add to bring your sohon tank back into working equilibrium? I want the answer along with the uncertainty range. Here. I will help you.”
She pulled a stainless steel pan out of the top drawer of her desk and swept the rubble and dust into it with a careless hand. Liquid crept away from her hand, up the side of an empty water glass. The stray dust followed along, obediently falling into the pan. “The pan masses fifty Earth grams, to ten decimal places. The contents masses the product I took out of the tank, in Earth grams, to three decimal places. The glass is thirty grams and masses standard nano-solvent to eight decimal places.”
She would have continued, but a ten-legged arthropoid figure had entered the doorway and was bouncing up and down in a pensively contemplative sort of way. “Go. Write it up, send it to my AID,” she concluded, dismissing the apprentice. She flipped the indicator on the side of the unbalanced tank from green to the amber warning light, and hit the lockout switch.
Looking up, she favored the Tchpth with a friendly, closed-mouth smile, “Wxlcht! It has been at least three years. Are you at peace?”
“I follow. And you?” Dancing gently on its spidery limbs, her friend offered the customary response, routinely indicating adherence to the enlightened species’ philosophical Path.
“I work. The grass grows.” She offered the closed-mouth, tiny quirk of the lips that had become the polite human smile.
“Is it a good season for your work?” he inquired.
“It is interesting.” She gave a negative.
“Would you have a moment for a game of aethal with an old friend?” She wondered idly what business he had on Adenast. Wxlcht was neither properly he nor she. She used the masculine pronouns for her social comfort, since the Tchpth did not care.
“Of course.” Her face lit with pleasure, she went to one of the walls and pulled out a box from a shelf underneath one of her plants. Tchpth were stronger than they looked to most humans. As she turned, Wxlcht had already pushed a human chair and a Tchpth platform up to the low table where they had played many games.
The human mentat took the board off the top of the box and set it in the center of the table, touching the randomizer button on the side. The triangles on the board immediately lit with the initial locations for the game pieces. For beginners, it would have also lit from beneath with the web of clan-group obligations, alliances of interest, and contracts. As both players were grandmasters, Michelle kept her board set for the traditional game, which incorporated random destabilizing events. The object of the game was, in a set period of time, to establish a stable web of interconnections that was more likely to lead to enlightenment than the opponent’s web. The game, of course, was far simplified from real life.
Wxlcht placed his pieces, making a show of examining the board. “You will certainly have to watch the interaction of your clan obligations with your contracts in this game. It would be especially difficult if your primary contract were to encounter a calculated treachery.”
Michelle looked at the board and blinked. The advice might match the board, but that fourth degree alliance on the left forward flank was far more hazardous. “You are talking about more than aethal,” she said.
“Yes. The human mentat Erick Winchon stole something essential to your contract with the Epetar Group. Have you been able to determine which Darhel Group Erick Winchon is working for?”
“Not with certainty. I suspect Cnothgar, but that is an initial impression and not proved.”
“You know my people’s capabilities, and you know my position. Most things involving humans we do not take notice of, as it would take far too much time away from our researches on the Path. Mentats are worthy of notice. I owe you a debt. My closest family is from Barwhon. Your clan was instrumental in rescuing one of my fctht mates. The human Erick Winchon was commissioned by and is working for a branch of the Epetar Group whose affiliation has been carefully concealed. The secrecy is for many reasons, but one of them is to place you in apparent breach of contract. You will not be able to prove the ownership, as they have used considerable resources to cover the track even from you. My people will not, for obvious reasons, confront the Darhel or the other mentat directly on this issue. Still, the information should be sufficient to clear the debt.”
“Yes, the debt is cleared. Thank you, friend,” she acknowledged.
“There is more, that would shift the balance of our alliance, if you wish to know it.”
“It is you that is offering. You would not offer if it wasn’t well worth owing you a debt. I would certainly like to hear it.” Protocol required, if possible, allowing the other to choose whether to take on a social debt. In the case of information, this of necessity had to be done before the recipient knew what she would be getting.
“We normally do not interfere with the younger races’ members who love to plot and intrigue, so long as it keeps them harmlessly occupied and out of the way of the more advanced among their own and other species. A younger student of our own race, watched by me, supervises for a time as a training exercise, but rarely has cause to either intervene or report. However, plots that risk setting two mentats against each other, unlikely though it is that either would be rash enough to allow a direct confrontation, are not harmless. We would not be averse to seeing future attempts of this kind discouraged. If the Epetar Group were to suffer great financial reversals that appeared to be the result of mismanagement, other Darhel groups would be inclined to dismiss any recent unusual adventures on Epetar’s part as ill-considered.”
“You know the safeguards in the system. If I intervene, it will be very clear that I did,” she said.