“Come on, Tycho,” Fiben said, tugging on the reins. “We can’t hang back or they’ll get suspicious. Anyway, you know that stuff gives you gas.”
Tycho shook his massive gray head and farted loudly.
“I told you so.” Fiben waved at the air.
A cargo wagon floated just behind the horse. The dented, half-rusted bin of the farm truck was filled with rough burlap sacks of grain. Obviously the antigrav stator still worked, butthe propulsion engine was kaput.
“Come on. Let’s get on with it.” Fiben tugged again.
Tycho gamely nodded, as if the workhorse actually understood. The traces tightened, and the hover truck bobbed along after them as they approached the checkpoint.
Soon, however, a keening sound on the road ahead warned of oncoming traffic. Fiben hurriedly guided horse and wagon to one side. With a high-pitched whine and a rush of air, an armored hovercraft swept by. Vehicles like it had been cruising eastward intermittently, in ones and twos, all day.
He looked carefully to make sure nothing else was coming before leading Tycho back onto the road. Fiben’s shoulders hunched nervously. Tycho snorted at the growing, unfamiliar scent of the invaders.
“Halt!”
Fiben jumped involuntarily. The amplified voice was mechanical, toneless, and adamant. “Move, move to this side… this side for inspection!”
Fiben’s heart pounded. He was glad his role was to act frightened. It wouldn’t be hard.
“Hasten! Make haste and present yourself!”
Fiben led Tycho toward the inspection stand, ten meters to the right of the highway. He tied the horse’s tether to a railed post and hurried around to where a pair of Talon Soldiers waited.
Fiben’s nostrils flared at the aliens’ dusty, lavender aroma. I wonder what they’d taste like, he thought somewhat savagely. It would have made no difference at all to his great-to-the-tenth-grandfather that these were sentient beings. To his ancestors, a bird was a bird was a bird.
He bowed low, hands crossed in front of him, and got his first close look at the invaders.
They did not seem all that impressive up close. True, the sharp yellow beak and razorlike talons looked formidable. But the stick-legged creatures were hardly much taller than Fiben, and their bones looked hollow and thin.
No matter. These were starfarers — senior patrons-class beings whose Library-derived culture and technology were all but omnipotent long, long before humans rose -up out of Africa’s savannah, blinking with the dawnlight of fearful curiosity. By the time man’s lumbering slowships stumbled upon Galactic civilization, the Gubru and their clients had wrested aposition of some eminence among the powerful interstellar clans. Fierce conservatism and facile use of the Great Library had taken them far since their own patrons had found them on the Gubru homeworld and given them the gift of completed minds.
Fiben remembered huge, bellipotent battle cruisers, dark and invincible under their shimmering allochroous shields, with the lambent edge of the galaxy shining behind them…
Tycho nickered and shied aside as one of the Talon Soldiers — its saber-rifle loosely slung — stepped past him to approach the tethered truck. The alien climbed onto the floating farm-hover to inspect it. The other guard twittered into a microphone. Half buried in the soft down around the creature’s narrow, sharp breastbone, a silvery medallion emitted clipped Anglic words.
“State… state identity… identity and purpose!”
Fiben crouched, down and shivered, pantomiming fear. He was sure not many Gubru knew much about neo-chimps. In the few centuries since Contact, little information would have yet passed through the massive bureaucracy of the Library Institute and found its way into local branches. And of course, the Galactics relied on the Library for nearly everything.
Still, verisimilitude was important. Fiben’s ancestors had understood one answer to a threat when a counter-bluff was ruled out — submission. Fiben knew how to fake it. He crouched lower and moaned.
The Gubru whistled in apparent frustration, probably having gone through this before. It chirped again, more slowly this time.
“Do not be alarmed, you are safe,” the vodor medallion translated at a lower volume than before. “You are safe… safe… We are Gubru… Galactic patrons of high dan and family… You are safe… Young haltsentients are safe when they are cooperative… You are safe. …”
Half-sentients… Fiben rubbed his nose to cover a sniff of indignation. Of course that was what the Gubru were bound to think. And in truth, few four-hundred-year-old client races could be called fully uplifted.
Still, Fiben noted yet another score to settle.
He was able to pick out meaning here and there in the invader’s chirpings before the vodor translated them. But one short course in Galactic Three, back in school, was not much to go on, and the Gubru had their own accent and dialect.
“. . . You are safe …” the vodor soothed. “The humans do not deserve such fine clients… You are safe…” .
Gradually, Fiben backed away and looked up, still trembling. Don’t overact, he reminded himself. He gave the gangling avian creature an approximation of a correct bow of respect from a bipedal junior client to a senior patron. The alien would surely miss the slight embellishment — an extension of the middle fingers — that flavored the gesture.
“Now,” the vodor barked, perhaps with a note of relief. “State name and purposes.”
“Uh, I’m F-Fiben… uh, s-s-ser.” His hands fluttered in front of him. It was a bit of theater, but the Gubru might know that neo-chimpanzees under stress still spoke using parts of the brain originally devoted to hand control.
It certainly looked as if the Talon Soldier was frustrated. Its feathers ruffled, and it hopped a little dance. “. . . purpose… purpose… state your purpose in approaching the urban area!”
Fiben bowed again, quickly.
“Uh… th’ hover won’t work no more. Th’ humans are all gone… nobody to tell us what to do at th’ farm …”
He scratched his head. “I figured, well, they must need food in town… and maybe some- somebody can fix th’ cart in trade for grain… ?” His voice rose hopefully.
The second Gubru returned and chirped briefly to the one in charge. Fiben could follow its GalThree well enough to get the gist.
The hover was a real farm tool. It would not take a genius to tell that the rotors just needed to be unfrozen for it to run again. Only a helpless drudge would haul an antigravity truck all the way to town behind a beast of burden, unable to make such a simple repair on his own.
The first guard kept one taloned, splay-fingered hand over the vodor, but Fiben gathered their opinion of chims had started low and was rapidly dropping. The invaders hadn’t even bothered to issue identity cards to the neo-chimpanzee population.
For centuries Earthlings — humans, dolphins, and chims — : had known the galaxies were a dangerous place where it was often better to have more cleverness than one was credited for. Even before the invasion, word had gone out among the chim population of Garth that it might be necessary to put on the old “Yes, massa!” routine.
Yeah, Fiben reminded himself. But nobody ever counted on all the humans being taken away! Fiben felt a knot in his stomach when he imagined the humans — mels, ferns, and children — huddled behind barbed wire in crowded camps.
Oh yeah. The invaders would pay.
The Talon Soldiers consulted a map. The first Gubru uncovered its vodor and twittered again at Fiben.
“You may go,” the vodor barked. “Proceed to the Eastside Garage Complex… You may go … Eastside Garage… Do you know the Eastside Garage?”