"But they're vertebrates, Doctor, they're apes! The fact is, they only qualify as predators on a technicality!"
"Yet qualify they do, my dear Chief Engineer, or they'd scarcely have evolved into sapient beings."
Running the soft grooming bristles growing along the undersides of his foremost pair of arms over his huge satiny-transparent eyes, Dlee Raftan Saon was barely aware of the gesture, which was reflexive. It always became more frequent when he was agitated. He'd have greatly preferred the comfortable ritual of filling, lighting, and tamping his long-stemmed briar pipe, but his companion's respiratory system, with which he had considerable professional acquaintance, was severely irritated by tobacco smoke.
"I beg you, Nannel Rab," he pleaded mockingly, "please tell me that you haven't acquired that pernicious habit of theirs, of judging others strictly by appearances."
Across from the doctor, Nannel Rab was as close to sitting as she ever came. Even as she tried to relax, the hairy palps either side of her mouth stirred restively, and she bounced a little on the eight furred, color-banded legs folded beneath her mass. On a low table between them, tall drinks of diluted grain alcohol (his flavored with honey, hers with dipteroid blood), gathered drops of moisture from the surrounding air.
Other voices came to them, muffled by a rough-textured ceiling, thick carpeting underfoot, soft upholstery, and an array of air curtains designed to provide privacy. Through a window close by, they could see into another lounge where marine sapients swam in liquid fluorocarbon charged with oxygen, breathable by the land species keeping them company. If her eight eyes, shiny black and of assorted sizes, had possessed lids, Nannel Rab would have blinked at what Dlee Raftan Saon had suggested. Even translated electronically, her voice was heavy with incredulity.
"Raftan, it has been my lifelong habit to judge peopleof any speciesonly by what they do. These creatures began by intruding here unannounced, uninvited, disputing our claim to this asteroid"
"Which only exists," he interrupted, "in their alternative version of the Solar System." He lifted a manipulator, forestalling any indignant retort on her part. "Nannel Rab, I don't question the justice of our claim hererather, the claim of Mister Thoggoshnor our right to be here, exploring. But it's wise to recall that we're the interlopers in this particular reality, and very far away from home."
"What is this American Soviet Socialist Republic anyway," she grumbled on as if she hadn't heard him, "but a coercive and collective state the likes of which more civilized versions of the Earth have not suffered in eons? Raftan, these people actually take orders from each other! I tell you, they're little more than savages!"
The doctor shook his head, a habit he'd learned from the very species under discussion. Given his exoskeletal configuration (he'd been compared by humans with a praying mantis a meter and a half tall), the motion came in short, hesitant jerks, his triangular face, mostly taken up by his eyes, swiveling on a nonexistent neck.
"Courageous savages, I daresay, to make what was for them a very arduous and dangerous voyage in three broken-down spacecraft left over from a previous generationrather badly designed spacecraft, I might add, never intended for anything more ambitious than low Earth orbit, and unused for the better part of a century."
She snorted. "They were desperate."
"Still, it was a desperation with roots stretching back well before their time. Collective states are constitutionally incapable of reliably producing anything but corpses. Invariably, they use up whatever economic health they may have inherited from previous regimes even faster than they use up people. And in the end, they all come to pin outrageous hopes for recoveryasteroidal wealth in the present instance, or petroleum reserves in the paston unreal expectations, in order . . ."
"In order to avoid abandoning the idiotic belief-system which made them desperate in the first place!"
"I know, I know." He nodded. "And so it was with our new human friends, although I gather that many of the individuals who were assigned here were disillusioned to begin withand sufficiently indiscreet about saying so, perhaps, that they wound up being sent on this mission. Certain others among them seem to be learning quickly. Which means that they're rather intelligent savages, as well."
"Possibly too intelligent for their own goodcertainly they are for ours!" The giant spider leaned forward, lifted her frosty glass, inserted its sipping tube past her complicated mouth-parts, and took a long, deep drink. "Consider the closely guarded secret of this asteroid, and Mister Thoggosh's high-flown ambitions for it. Look at the way they winkled that out of our esteemed partner-cum-employer. Human friends, you say? Raftan, are we speaking the same language?"
In fact they were not. From long association, each understood a smattering of the other's speech; neither was capable of generating the noises required for conversation. Nannel Rab had not said "winkled." Belonging to a species notoriously limited to a liquid diet, she'd used a verb-complex meaning, "draw blood for nutritional purposes." Dlee Raftan Saon's personal computer was well aware that a literal translation wouldn't have carried her intended meaning, since his ancestors had devoured their prey in chunks. For his benefit, it selected phonemes implying, "glean tidbits from one's seizing-claws." (Licking one's fingers was an equivalent habit, but that would have failed to convey the thought.) Only information-storage-and-retrieval devices implanted within the nervous systems of many simian, ursine, or dinosauroid/avian sapients would have chosen "winkled," meaning, "prise small scraps of meat from shellfish."
The physician followed the engineer's example, finishing his drink and mentally ordering another via the electronic network connecting his own cerebro-cortical implant with every other on the asteroid. As his order was brought by something resembling a large, glossy snake (it was actually the "messenger" tentacle of a bartender belonging to the same squidlike species as their associate, Mister Thoggosh), Dlee Raftan Saon patiently endured Nannel Rab's continuing diatribe.
"their revolting mating habits, Raftan. That snoop Eichra Oren, coupling with Toya Pulaski merely for political purposes!"
Like everyone else in the small, isolated community who felt that they had little enough to amuse themselves with, both had followed recent gossip about the young human female who had been forced by her people's secret police to seduce Mister Thoggosh's only human employee in order to discover what was being searched for on an asteroid which, following human practice, was now being called "5023 Eris."
At the same time, Mister Thoggoshthe entrepreneur who sought a hoard of ancient Predecessor artifacts herefearing what Marxist governments might do with such advanced technology (rumored to include a faster-than-light spaceship drive), had made similar demands of Eichra Oren, hoping to keep track of what the girl learned.
Dlee Raftan Saon made the dry, rustling noise that served his species as a chuckle. "I know your species marries for love, Nannel Rab. Mine, too, although we both have nonsapient relatives who tend to confuse their suitors with a midnight snack. I'll point out that Nek Nam'l Las is an arachnoid we'd both consider highly civilized. Nevertheless, her species never weds for anything but politics, and only stopped devouring the groom on the wedding night with the promulgation of her world's Sanguinary Edicts, a mere seven and a half centuries ago."
The mantis and the spider both paused to shudder over the strange customs of aliens. The culture they shared had consisted of little else for 15,000 years, since the Eldersan ancient species of spiral-shelled, sapient molluscs of which Mister Thoggosh was a leading memberhad begun traveling between parallel universes. Until convinced that the practice was unethical, the Elders had "collected" millions of sapient beings (including mantises, spiders, and Eichra Oren's human forebears from preglacial Antarctica) from thousands of alternative versions of Earth. Even so, there were still times, for specific individuals, when mutual tolerance came somewhat less than easily.
"In any case," the doctor offered, "Toya has since shifted her attentions to Corporal Owen, the machinist, who shares her interest in paleontology, while Eichra Oren increasingly seeks the companionship of my professional colleague, Rosalind Nguyen. Left to themselves, perhaps they prefer mating for personal reasons, after all."
"What they prefer is theft, rape, and murder! Having abandoned space for a hundred years, it was only that incentive which moved them to follow up their preliminary intrusion here by assembling not just one armed space fleet but twoAmerican and Russianthe latter commanded by that butcher, what's-his-name, Nikola Deshovich, the one they call `the Banker,' for invasion of this asteroid!"
"Only after we'd discovered that 5023 Eris is no natural asteroid, but a giant spaceship, a technological prize too glorious to ignore. And it was three fleets, my dear. You have excluded mention of the Chinese People's Republic."
"Advisedly." She sniffed. "They came to rescue us. They had no way of knowing that it was unnecessary, between our technological superiority on the one manipulator"
"And the fact that each of us makes a personal habit of going heavily armed, on the other . . ."
"Not to mention Mister Thoggosh's last-minute refit of those three American shuttlecraft."
Dlee Raftan Saon laughed. "Giving him something to do with his otherwise useless mining equipment."
Had she been physically capable of it, Nannel Rab might have blushed. As the Elders' chief engineer for this project, she'd felt personally responsible for the failure of those nuclear plasma devicesuntil they'd eventually discovered that the artificial asteroid was covered, under a thin layer of accreted topsoil, with a metallic skin so dense that not even neutrinos could penetrate it.
"Of all of the humans I've encountered so far," the giant spider offered, "excepting Eichra Oren and his mother, of course" With her mention of the latter there was no sarcasm in Nannel Rab's voice; Eneri Relda was an original Antarctican, vastly long-lived even in the Elders' culture, "only the Chinese are worthy of admiration."
"My dear Nannel Rab, the PRC Extra-Special Forces only came here hoping to obtain politically what they couldn't take by force. And Chinese historyfrom Temujin to Tien Anmen Squareis every bit as bloodsoaked and collectivized as any"
"Yes, Doctor, but at least they had good sense enough to try to simulate individualism in order to restimulate their technical and economic progress."
"Certainlyby conscripting tens of thousands of bewildered and unwilling peasants, isolating them in mountain villages, and forcing them to be free at gunpoint." The doctor laughed again. "I must say, Nannel Rab, that your attitude surprises me. I was under the distinct impression that you liked these humans. You've always been civil to them, even pleasant at times."
"Those who try," the words came grudgingly, "to act like sapients. I suppose that you're right, that they can't help being what they are. Besides, we may well have been like that ourselvesour respective species, I meanbefore we discovered real civilization. It was so long ago that nobody remembers."
"Nobody cares to remember." The physician nodded. "Except the Elders. They never forget anything."
"Thank the Egg," Nannel Rab sighed, unconsciously referring to the myth-system of an altogether different species that both were well acquainted with, "that all three fleets departed or were destroyed. We still have the humans from the first expedition and a few leftover invaders, but the excitement's over and done with."
"Yes," Dlee Raftan Saon agreed, raising his glass, "thank the Egg."
But they were both wrong.
It had only begun.