Even the Mover of Worlds. Most importantly, the Outsiders had allowed the puppeteers to act as their agents among warmlife sentient races, for a very modest percentage. But the Outsiders always had their own agenda, and it was one that no non-cryogenic creature could possibly appreciate. It pleased her to see Diplomat square his heads. His posture was subtly more vibrant. Perhaps the drugs were helping after all. "I shall review the datacube for more details, though I reserve the right to ask further questions," he declared. "May I ask how long until we rendezvous with the Outsider ship?”
"Less than an hour," Warrior replied. "Prepare for maneuvers. The helium beasts have set up a number of force curtains around their vessel. I do not know why.”
Guardian chirped a command to her console, and activated Diplomats forceweb.
She paused, then snaked her left head around to look at Diplomat. He met her gaze with a chemically enhanced calm.
"You had better chew more drugs, Little Talker. You will need them." She turned back to her console, adjusting schematics. But she kept one head inclined slightly toward her passenger.
The datacube's contents scrolled across the twin screens in front of Diplomat, one for each head. Within a few minutes, he stopped the screens, opened his supply pack again, and swallowed another, larger drugcud. Diplomat whistled, and data resumed its inexorable flow across his screens.
Guardian had kept silent while Diplomat popped the second mood regulator oval. Now her heads whipped up and faced one another, eye to eye. She growled without her usual roughness.
"Yes," she crooned, "now you grasp the Hindmost's concern firmly with both mouths. Two warlike races with interstellar capability, and weapons of mass destruction." She paused for effect, waiting.
"They have intruded into contested Outsider geometry with reaction drives and nuclear explosives?" Diplomat asked not believing.
"Just so. And not so very long after the Pact.”
The little puppeteer drummed a hoof. "I am expected to communicate with these captives.”
Guardian blinked agreement. "The datacube contains the two downloads to your translator module. You will be able to talk to them, Little Talker.”
Diplomat continued to look at the information scurrying across his screen. He scrabbled in his pack, swallowed another regulator of drugcud. "One of them is a… carnivore." He had difficulty with the word, which was a puppeteer obscenity, unused in polite society.
"Indeed," she replied. "They are the larger of the two species, are they not? The ones that call themselves the kzin? But they are not the issue that most concerns the Hindmost, Little Talker, nor me. It is these… humans. Perhaps you recognize their morphological type.”
Diplomat fluted confusion, then fell silent as more data flowed across his screens. He shuddered, and his own forked left tongue touched his lip-fingers repeatedly. He stopped dead, tonguing the left screen to freeze mode.
Ah, Guardian thought. The hoof strikes home.
Diplomat wailed a sudden musical siren of alarm.
Guardian's heads looked at one another again in the puppeteer expression of humor. "I was wondering," she softly sang to Diplomat, who was making sounds like a demented calliope, "when you would make the connection.”
Diplomat swiftly wrapped his necks around his body, still keening in fear. The screens froze and then blanked for lack of an operator.
"These… humans are clearly Pak breeders, though they do appear different in many ways." Guardian reached over with a long neck into her own medical bag, and removed a hypospray of sedative.
Guardian considered the petite puppeteer quivering before her. His necks were tucked so tightly around his body that he looked like a foal's plaything.
She swallowed in sequence, considering. Despite appearances, this cowardly little Diplomat had saved an entire puppeteer colony world from destruction by the Q'rynmoi. Guardian knew of few of her caste Herdmates who were willing to face the personal dangers that Diplomat had. It was a difficult story to believe, however, seeing him in this state.
It was said by the Hindmost's psychists that Diplomat's corrective mindsculpting after that event had been incomplete; they had advised more memory flensing before releasing him to active status.
A Hindmost's Command remained exactly that, however. The Deepest Council had concurred.
She considered that perhaps there was more to this delicate little talker than met her own Guardian eyes. She couldn't put her lips quite on it, but there was something different. Something almost brave, despite his periodic catatonic states and whining manner. He would clearly need her help to complete this mission, as well as the reverse.
"You remember the Pak, my little Diplomat, don't you?" She spoke almost conversationally as she calmly injected the near catatonic puppeteer in the right neck. The hypospray made a hissing sound, loud in the tiny lifebubble. Guardian made adjustments to the ventilation system, flushing out Diplomat's fear pheromones with fresh, Herd-conditioned air. Diplomat stopped screaming, trembled for a moment and then seemed to fall asleep. She tightened his forceweb harness remotely.
Guardian looked at her own heads again. "Yes. The Pak are not extinct, after all. Despite the efforts of three sentient races and ten thousand years of effort." She deopaqued a small portion of the hull directly in front of her console made a few further course corrections.
Guardian settled back into her own forceweb harness and whistled a duet with herself softly. The tune soothed her, and reminded the soldier puppeteer of her first days in creche.
It was a marching song, ancient beyond measure. The music was said to be common when Guardians ancestors had led entire herds of Diplomat's forebears to new grazing grounds with the turn in seasons. The arpeggios sang volumes about order, confidence, and glowing success.
After a few moments, she reached over with a head, and fondly patted the back of the sleeping puppeteer next to her.
"Two warrior races," she sang quietly. Forked tongues flicked over both sets of lip-fingers. "Two threats to the security of the Race." Warrior paused, watching their blinking course plot intently on the hullscreen.
"Or perhaps three," she added, after reflection.
The Outsider ship grew still larger as the Wisdom of Retreat approached rendezvous.
CHAPTER FOUR
In its youth, the universe was very different. They Who Passed observed the strange fresh wilderness through a window less than an atom wide.
Gravity had made its rule known over vast clouds of gas and dust. Many had coalesced, contracted, and at last collapsed. The gravity-squeezed gas became hotter and hotter, atoms thrusting together in the rough romance of nuclear reactions, releasing energy and transmuting elements. These glowing clouds became hot youthful stars of the first stellar generation, their fusion fires spendthrift with the bounty of gravity's first clasp.
Still, that initial blaze of starlight was but a dim reminder of the first moments of creation, when all of reality had been hotter by many orders of magnitude.
Clouds of glowing gas, hot young suns set within them like jewels in oil. Twists and spirals of electromagnetic fields. Ions and charged particles streaked along paths appointed by the fresh laws of this space-time continuum. The early days.
Such were the alien vistas observed by They Who Pass, peering through the distorted interdimensional windows of the cosmic strings.
The minds suspended in the other universe were fascinated, in their way, with this strange space-time continuum. They wished to study and examine these new laws roughly ruling the brawling new universe, as if in haste.
But how? They Who Pass were ironically named; they could not pass, through the tortured windows between realities, into such an exotic and alien place. Even if such an act were possible, the laws of existence in the other universe were sufficiently different to make their own survival improbable. But complex data had passed from within the alien universe into their own. Surely the reciprocal would be found to be the case as well.