“She’s not. She’s tired. I’m tired. We’ve come a long way. So leave us alone.”
“Oh? Since when did you learn to read Cecropian thoughts? You don’t know how she feels. Seems to me she might be in trouble.”
The squat stranger began to stretch to his full height, then changed his mind and sat down, squeezing onto the couch next to the Cecropian. “What the hell. I got too much to do to hassle on this. Atvar H’sial’s my partner. I understand her, she understands me. Here, take a look at this place from ten feet up.”
He sat silent for a second, frowning at nothing. Suddenly the Cecropian at his side moved. Two of the jointed forearms reached out to grip Garnoff by the waist. Before the supervisor could do more than shout, he was lifted into the air, high above the Cecropian’s great white head, and held there wriggling.
“All right, At, that’s enough. Put him down easy.” Louis Nenda nodded as the Cecropian gently lowered Garnoff to the floor. “Happy now? Or do you need a full-scale demo?”
But Garnoff was already backing away, out of reach of the long jointed limbs. “You can both stay here and rot, far as I’m concerned.” When he was at a safe distance he paused. “How the hell did you do that? Talk to her, I mean. I thought no human could communicate with a Cecropian without an interpreter.”
Louis Nenda shrugged without looking at Garnoff. “Got me an augment, back on Karelia. Send and receive. Cost a lot, but it’s been worth it. Now, you go an’ give us a bit of peace.”
He waited until Garnoff was at the entrance to the waiting room, forty meters away. “You were right, At.” The silent and invisible pheromonal message diffused across to the Cecropian’s receptors. “They’re here on Miranda, staying over in Delbruck. Both of ’em, J’merlia and Kallik.”
There was a slow, satisfied nodding of the blind white head. “So I surmised.” Atvar H’sial vibrated her wing cases, as though shaking off the dust of weeks of travel. “That is satisfactory. Did you establish communication?”
“Not from here. Too dangerous. We don’t call ’em, see, till we know we can get to ’em in person. That way nobody can talk them out of it.”
“No one will talk my J’merlia out of anything, once he knows that I am alive and present again in the spiral arm. But I accept that personal contact is preferable… if it can be accomplished. How do you propose that we proceed?”
“Well…” Louis Nenda reached into his pocket and pulled out a wafer-thin card. “That last jump pushed us down to the bottom of our credit. How far to Delbruck?”
“Two thousand four hundred kilometers, by direct flight.”
“We can’t afford that. What about overland?”
“How are the mighty fallen.” Atvar H’sial sat crouched for a moment in calculation. “Three thousand eight hundred kilometers over land, if we avoid crossing any water body.”
“Okay.” It was Nenda’s turn to calculate. “Three days by ground transport. Just enough for the trip, with nothing left at the end. Not even for food on the way. What do you think?”
“I do not think.” The pheromones were touched with resignation. “When there is no choice, I act.”
The great Cecropian untucked her six limbs. She stood erect to tower four feet above Louis Nenda. “Come. As we say in my species, Delay is the deadliest form of denial. To Delbruck.”
It was a transformed Louis Nenda who led Atvar H’sial off the bus in Delbruck three days later. He was clean-shaven and wearing a smart new outfit of royal blue.
“Well, that worked out real nice.” The pheromones grinned at Atvar H’sial while Nenda waved a serious good-bye to four gloomy passengers. He hailed a local cab sized to accommodate large aliens.
The Cecropian nodded. “It worked. But it will not work twice, Louis Nenda.”
“Sure it’ll work. ‘One born every minute’ needs updating. One born ever second is more like it. The arm’s full of ’em.”
“They were becoming suspicious.”
“Of what? They checked the shoe to make sure there was no way anyone could see into it.”
“At some point one of them would wonder if the shoe were equally opaque to sound.” Atvar H’sial sprawled luxuriantly across the back of the cab and opened her black wing cases to soak up the sun. The delicate vestigial wings within were marked by red and white elongated eyespots.
“What if they did? They made you sit over in the back, where you were out of sight of me.”
“Perhaps. But at some point one of them would have begun to wonder about pheromones, and nonverbal and nonvisual signals. I tell you, I will not repeat that exercise.”
“Hey, don’t start feeling sorry for them. They work for the Alliance government. They’ll chisel it back. All it means is another microcent on the taxes.”
“You misunderstand my motives.” The yellow horns quivered. “I am of a race destined to build worlds, to light new suns, to rule whole galaxies. I will not again sink to such trivia. It is beneath the dignity of a Cecropian.”
“Sure, At. Beneath mine, too. And you might get caught.” Nenda peered up to the top of the building where the cab had halted. He turned to the driver. “You real sure of this address?”
“Positive. Fortieth floor and up, air-breathing aliens only. Just like the bug here.” The cabbie stared down his nose at Atvar H’sial and drove off.
Nenda glared after the cab, shrugged, and led the way inside.
The air in the building was filled with a stench of rotting seaweed. It made Nenda’s nose wrinkle as they entered the thirty-foot cube of the elevator. “Air-breathers! Smells more like Karelian mud-divers to me.” But Atvar H’sial was nodding happily. “It is indeed the right place.” The antennas on top of her eyeless white head partially unfurled. “I can detect traces of J’merlia. He has been inside this structure within the past few hours. Let us proceed higher.”
Even with his augment, Nenda lacked the Cecropian’s infinitely refined sensitivity to odors. He took them up floor by floor in the elevator, until Atvar H’sial finally nodded.
“This one.” But now the pheromones carried a hint of concern.
“What’s wrong, At?”
“In addition to traces of my J’merlia, and to your Hymenopt, Kallik…” She was moving along a broad corridor, and at last paused before a door tall and wide enough to admit something twice her size. “I seem to detect — wait!”
It was too late. Nenda had pressed the side plate and the great door was already sliding open. The Cecropian and the Karelian human found themselves on the threshold of a domed and cavernous chamber, forty meters across.
Nenda peered in through the gloom. “You were wrong, At. There’s nobody in here.”
But the Cecropian had reared up to her full height and was pointing off to the side where two figures were bent over a low table. They looked up as the door opened. There was a gasp of mutual recognition. Instead of seeing the stick-thin figure of a Lo’tfian and the tubby round body of the Hymenopt, Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial were facing the human forms of Alliance Councilor Graves and embodied computer, E.C. Tally.
“We were dumped off in the middle of nowhere…”
There had been half a minute of surprised and unproductive reaction — “What are you two doing here? You’re supposed to be off chasing Zardalu…” “More to the point, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be thirty thousand light-years away, out on Serenity and fighting each other…” After a little of that, Louis Nenda had been given the floor. His pheromonal aside to Atvar H’sial — Don’t worry. Trust me! — went unnoticed by the other two.