“Sh!” Gailet motioned for him to be silent. “I’ll explain later, Fiben. Right now, please, let me think.”
Gailet settled into a corner, wrapping her arms around her knees. Absently, she scratched the fur on her left leg. Her eyes were unfocused, and when Fiben made a gesture, as if to offer to groom her, she did not even respond. She only looked off toward the horizon, as if her mind were very far away.
Back in their cell they found that many changes had been made. “I guess we passed,all those tests,” Fiben said, staring at their transformed quarters.
The chains had been taken away soon after the Suzerain’s first visit, that dark night weeks ago. After that occasion the straw on the floor had been replaced by mattresses, and they had been allowed books.
Now, though, that was made to seem Spartan, indeed. Plush carpeting had been laid down, and an expensive holo-tapestry covered most of one wall. There were such amenities as beds and chairs and a desk, and even a music deck.
“Bribes,” Fiben muttered as he sorted through some of the record cubes. “Hot damn, we’ve got something they want. Maybe the Resistance isn’t over. Maybe Athaclena and Robert are stinging them, and they want us to—”
“This hasn’t got anything to do with your general, Fiben,” Gailet said in a very low voice, barely above a whisper. “Or not much, at least. It’s a whole lot bigger than that.” Her expression was tense. All the way back, she had been silent and nervous. At times Fiben imagined he could hear wheels turning in her head.
Gailet motioned for him to follow her to the new holo wall. At the moment it was set to depict a three-dimensional scene of abstract shapes and patterns — a seemingly endless vista of glossy cubes, spheres, and pyramids stretching into the infinite distance. She sat cross-legged and twiddled with the controls. “This is an expensive unit,” she said, a little louder than necessary. “Let’s have some fun and find out what it can do.”
As Fiben sat down beside her, the Euclidean shapes blurred and vanished. The controller clicked under Gailet’s hand, and a new scene suddenly leaped into place. The wall now seemed to open onto a vast, sandy beach. Clouds filled the sky out to a lowering, gray horizon, pregnant with storms. Breakers rolled less than twenty meters away, so realistic that Fiben’s nostrils flared as he tried to catch the salt scent.
Gailet concentrated on the controls. “This may be the ticket,” he heard her mumble. The almost perfect beachscape flickered, and in its place there suddenly loomed a wall of leafy green — a jungle scene, so near and real that Fiben almost felt he could leap through and escape into its green mists, as if this were one of those mythical “teleportation devices” one read of in romantic fiction, and not just a high-quality holo-tapestry.
He contemplated the scene Gailet had chosen. Fiben could tell at once that it wasn’t a jungle of Garth. The creeper-entwined rain forest was a vibrant, lively, noisy scene, filled with color and variety. Birds cawed and howler monkeys shrieked.
Earth, then, he thought, and wondered if the Galaxy would ever let him fulfill his dream of someday seeing the homewor\d. Not bloody likely, the way things are.
His attention drew back as Gailet spoke. “Just let me adjust this here, to make it more realistic.” The sound level rose. Jungle noise burst forth to surround them. What is she trying to do? he wondered.
’ Suddenly he noticed something. As Gailet twiddled with the volume level, her left hand moved in a crude but eloquent gesture. Fiben blinked. It was a sign in baby talk, the hand language all infant chims used until the age of four, when speech finally became useful.
Grownups listening, she said.
Jungle sounds seemed to fill the room, reverberating from the other walls. “There,” she said in a low voice. “Now they can’t listen in on us. We can talk frankly.”
“But — ” Fiben started to object, then he saw the gesture again. Grownups listening…
Once more his respect for Gailet’s cleverness grew. Of course she knew this simple method would not stop snoopers from picking up their every word. But the Gubru and their agents might imagine the chims foolish enough to think it would! If the two of them acted as if they believed they were safe from eavesdropping…
Such a tangled web we weave, Fiben thought. This was real spy stuff. Fun, in a way.
It was also, he knew, dangerous as hell.
“The Suzerain of Propriety has a problem,” Gailet told him aloud. Her hands lay still on her lap.
“It told you that? But if the Gubru are in trouble, why—”
“I didn’t say the Gubru — although I think that’s true, as well. I was talking about the Suzerain of Propriety itself. It’s having troubles with its peers. The priest seriously overcom-mitted itself in a certain matter, some time back, and now it seems there’s hell to pay over it.”
Fiben just sat there, amazed that the lofty alien lord had deigned to tell an earthworm of a Terran client such things. He wasn’t comfortable with the idea. Such confidences were likely to be unhealthy. “What were these overcommitments?” he asked.
“Well, for one thing,” Gailet went on, scratching her kneecap, “some months ago it insisted that many parties of Talon Soldiers and scientists be sent up into the mountains.”
“What for?”
Gailet’s face took on an expression of severe control. “They were sent searching for … for Garthlings.”
“For what?” Fiben blinked. He started to laugh. Then he cut short when he saw the warning flicker in her eyes. The hand scratching her knee curled and turned in a motion that signified caution.
“For Garthlings,” she repeated.
Of all the superstitious nonsense, Fiben thought. Ignorant, yellow-card chims use Garthling fables to frighten their children. It was rich to think of the sophisticated Gubru falling for such tall tales.
Gailet did not seem to find the idea amusing, though.
“You can imagine why the Suzerain would be excited, Fiben, once it had reason to believe Garthlings might exist. Imagine what a fantastic coup it would be for any clan who claimed adoption rights on a pre-sentient race that had survived the Bururalli Holocaust. Immediate takeover of Earth’s tenancy rights here would be the very least of the consequences.”
Fiben saw her point. “But… but what in the world made it think in the first place, that—”
“It seems our Tymbrimi Ambassador, Uthacalthing, was largely responsible for the Suzerain’s fixation, Fiben. You remember that day of the chancery explosion, when you tried to break into the Tymbrimi Diplomatic Cache?”
Fiben opened his mouth. He closed it again. He tried to think. What kind of game was Gailet playing now?
The Suzerain of Propriety obviously knew that he, Fiben, was the chim who had been sighted ducking through the smoke and stench of fried Gubru clerical workers on the day of the explosion at the one-time Tymbrimi Embassy. It knew Fiben was the one who had played a frustrated game of tag with the cache guardian, and who later escaped over a cliff face under the very beaks of a squad of Talon Soldiers.
Did it know because Gailet had told it? If so,’ had she also told the Suzerain about the secret message Fiben had found in the back of the cache and delivered to Athaclena?
He could not ask her these things. The warning look in her eyes kept him silent. I hope she knows what she’s doing, he prayed fervently. Fiben felt clammy under his arms. He brushed a bead of sweaf from his eyebrow. “Go on,” he said in a dry voice.
“Your visit invalidated diplomatic immunity and gave the Gubru the excuse they were looking for, to break into the cache. Then the Gubru had what they thought was a real stroke of luck. The cache autodestruct partially failed. There was evidence inside, Fiben, evidence pertaining to private investigations into the Garthling question by the Tymbrimi Ambassador.”