The Gripping Hand (42 page)

"Including you, Blaine?" Rawlins demanded. "The Word in the fleet was that you were
raised
by Moties."

"Somewhat," Chris Blaine said. "We were still in New Caledonia and my father was on the High Commission until I was six years old. It was when we got back to Sparta and my parents set up the Institute that I got to see the Moties every day. Ivan was dead by then, and Glenda Ruth was just born. She saw a lot more of Jock and Charlie and never met Ivan at all."

"Um. Now what about
Hecate
's cargo?"

Renner said. "Chris, let me. You've never even seen the Crazy Eddie Worm. You were on blockade—"

"
Hold
it, Captain." There was a snap in Blaine's voice. "Commander Rawlins, the Worm is a hole card of sorts. Sir, are you sure you want to know more?"

Though he was pretty sure lieutenants didn't talk that way to captains, Renner held his tongue. Rawlins said frostily, "Why wouldn't I want to know, Lieutenant?"

"If you know and you talk to Moties, they'll learn it," Blaine said. "Commander, until you've been around Moties, you just can't understand how quickly they learn to interpret
everything
you say or do."

"I may have an idea," Rawlins said. "A year aboard my ship and nobody in the wardroom will play poker with you."

"Yes, sir. They may learn from Captain Renner anyway, but probably not. He's had more experience dealing with Moties. They won't learn from His Excellency. Or me."

"Won't learn what?"

They turned to see Joyce Mei-Ling coming into
Sinbad
's lounge.

"All right," Rawlins said. "I'll take your word for it, it's valuable, and it's better that I don't know about this Crazy Eddie Worm. Captain Renner, if the objective is to recover Miss Blaine and her cargo, how do we go about doing it?"

"That's the question," Renner said.

"We negotiate." Bury was onscreen. "Forgive me, I was invited to listen. Commander Rawlins, what is important now is that we appear to be ready to fight, and that the Moties believe that overwhelming Imperial forces will come to our rescue in the not too distant future, so that it is better for the Moties to conclude an agreement with us now while they still have strength."

"Yeah. And that they don't learn just how far the Blockade Fleet is from us. Only it's not so far, sir. Into the Crazy Eddie point and back with the Squadron."

"Except that whatever's left there will shoot before listening. There's no real way to tell a Motie ship from an Imperial," Renner said.

"Damn. Of course that's right. And we can't get a message back to
Agamemnon
either. Commodore, I'm real glad you're in charge and not me." Rawlins paused. "One thing, though. Admiral Weigle's in command of the blockade fleet. He's got to know
something
has happened. The Jump point back to New Cal has moved, he damned well will know
that
, so he'll send back for orders, fast. Also he'll look for the new Jump point to the Mote."

"What will he do if he finds it?" Renner asked.

Rawlins shook his head. "Stand guard over it, I suppose. But you know, sir, Weigle's an aggressive commander. He just might send a scout. We'd better watch for that. All right, Blaine, what else don't I know?"

"A lot, but we don't know it either," Chris Blaine said. "For example. These space civilizations are more like nomads than anything settled. No stable maps, no permanent homes. A few, like the ones in the big planetary moons, are relatively fixed, but mostly things shift and change. The value of . . . air, food, power, machinery, anything that has to be moved, it depends on distance and delta-vee. It changes every second. There must be ways to sell delta-vee."

"Hah," Rawlins said. "As if the old Silk Routes changed distances. One day it's like walking across a river bridge to get to Far Cathay. Next month it's thousands of miles away."

"It was like that!" Joyce exclaimed. "When things were stable and there were strong governments, it was only a few weeks from Persia to China, but when the nomads were strong and bandits blocked the passes, it could be months or years, or no land routes at all. And there were pirate empires in Viet Nam and Sumatra, so even the sea routes weren't stable."

"An interesting observation," Bury said. "Which may do much to give us new understanding of these Moties. Thank you, Joyce. Kevin, perhaps we should assume these Moties are more similar to bedouin Arabs than to your Empire."

"Wonderful," Renner said. "The only Arabs I know are you and Nabil."

"Face," Joyce said. "Arabs are concerned with saving face, even more than Chinese. Appearances are very important. Maybe to the Moties, too?"

"I didn't notice that on Mote Prime," Renner said. "But maybe I wouldn't have. But— You know, they did have stories about everything. The paintings, the statuary, they made up stories to hide their past, and they did put the best face they could on things. On the other hand it occurs to me that Chris and Glenda Ruth, me, all of us only knew Mote Prime Moties. Which means none of us are real experts."

"Except His Excellency," Chris Blaine said. "Look at how valuable Bury Mediators are. Of course they're expecting the Empire to be much more like Mr. Bury sees it than as we do."

"As I saw it nearly thirty years ago, Lieutenant," Bury said.

"Damnation," Rawlins said. "Commodore, this is way over my head. Only thing I'm sure of, if we let something happen to Lord Blaine's daughter, my career is finished. Well, I guess I know what to do, keep the guns and torpedoes ready and wait for orders. Commodore, you tell me what to shoot at, I'll try to shoot it, but I sure don't know any more than that!"

"Join the club. Signing off." Renner thumbed the switch.

Joyce turned to Chris Blaine. "All right, what's the Crazy Eddie Worm?"

"I can't tell you," Chris said.

She turned to Renner. "The deal was, I learn everything. Now you're going back on that?"

Chris Blaine said. "Joyce, do you want to be forbidden to talk to Moties?"

"No, of course not. And you can't do that!"

"We can't do that. Joyce, we can't fall thirty stories unless somebody's pushed us off a balcony! There are things you can't know. If you know them, you can't talk to Moties because then the Moties would know them, too."

She didn't believe him, not even when Kevin nodded at her.

"Kevin!"

Renner vaguely knew he was asleep, and someone was trying to wake him, and he didn't care.

"Come on, Kevin. Come on, open the bloody circuit. Your attention please, Captain Renner. God damn it, Kevin — "

"Yeah? Buckman? What?"

"It's a message from nowhere, Kevin, nowhere we know about anyway. I just got it."

"Message from nowhere. Important. What is it?"

"It was a general broadcast, wide beam. Must have cost a lot of power to send. Kevin, there's a cover message and a complete library of astronomy for the past hundred thousand years! More, I think! You were asleep, so before I woke you I did some tests. I sampled their observations to see how they match the New Caledonia data base over the past few hundred years. It all verifies, all I tested does anyway. Kevin, I think you've got to do something about this. Oh, and
Phidippides
wants to talk.
Atropos
wants to talk."

"Yeah." Renner found his uniform and wrestled his legs into it. "Verification. Well?"

"Loci for some of the more obvious stars check out. I started a program to verify the orbits of Murcheson's Eye and the Mote. Then I came and got you. It should be finished by now."

"Okay, let's go." He squeezed through the curtain. "Hello, Horace. You're looking well this morning. Cynthia, we need breakfast, large, served at our posts." Into his acceleration couch. "Jacob, first show me that message. Then you can get me
Atropos
."

"It's this file."

The message was printed out on Kevin's screen, but it gave the impression of being written on a scroll:

"Greetings, O Caliph from alar, from the newest of your servants. You may think of us as the Library at Alexandria; our locus is described in this vector. We give you this record of all of our history's observations of this region of the sky. We have watched the skies for countless ages, and we offer all this to you that you will be pleased with us and know how useful we can be. Remember us, O Caliph, when you come into your kingdom."

 

Renner was at a loss for words. Not so Bury: "This tells us many things," he said, "not the least of which is that they have a Bury-apprentice Mediator."

"What else?"

"They know nothing of us. They're powerless and poor. They have no way to engage in dialogue with us, which may imply that they fear Medina, or that they are light-hours away."

"Both, I'd say," Blaine said. "But they're certainly a long way off towards Mote Gamma. They've got good detection. They broadcast across just over two billion kilometers. Even so, they must be poverty-stricken, or they would have sent something, if only a relay to project a narrower beam."

Bury dreamed, his face calm and perfectly still. "Yes. As is, look what they've done. They've spilled their secrets across the sky. They've given away all they had because there was no way to establish a trade. Perhaps the strangers are not strangers to gratitude. Exactly right, for those with no power at all."

"Thanks—"

"There is more. They believe we are powerful, or likely to become so. This argues that others do also. The question is, why? Certainly we are not now."

"Thanks, Horace. Buckman, what have you got?"

"New program just finishing. Their orbits for the Eye and the Mote check against what I've got, with a minor margin of error."

"A hundred thousand years of observations?"

"That, or two or three."

"Okay, get me—"

"Wait one, Kevin. This is finished. Mmm . . ."

Renner watched Buckman dreaming before his screen and presently said, "See if you can describe it," biting off the words.

"Yeah. It's a reiterative program to predict the collapse of Buck-man's Protostar. Kevin, at first blush it looks like Medina Trading should have had this. It would have given them the right date . . . year. I mean this is really, seriously valuable."

"Okay. Get me
Atropos
."

"Yes, sir, we received a copy, too," Rawlins said. "It came from an asteriod that trails the Beta Leading Trojans."

"Onk?"

"Beta Leading Trojans, sir—"

"Right, I understand that."

"Well, there's an asteroid that trails that group. The group is sixty degrees in front of Mote Beta."

"Naturally."

"And this is maybe fifty degrees from Beta."

"Unstable. Had to be nudged, right, Jacob? Anything else, Rawlins?"

"Yeah, my Sailing Master is a science buff, and he hasn't
stopped playing with that since he got it."

Eudoxus's sneer was clear and blatant, if hard to describe. " 'Library at Alexandria,' forsooth! Their claim would have been valid once. They're near broken, now. They still had some of their wealth ten years ago."

"That would be when they bought a Bury Mediator," Kevin surmised.

The Motie didn't visibly react. "Yes, they bought their Bury Fyunch(click) from Persia. They were maintaining their ancient tradition of collecting and codifying knowledge. Perhaps they still are.

"They're the oldest family we know of. They've traded in information throughout history. They've had to move countless times. They were in the Leading Trojans of Beta eight thousand years ago, at the killing of the Doctors."

"We heard of that," Renner said. Something made him add, "No, I guess we didn't."

"Was there a Killing of the Doctors on Mote Prime? I'm not surprised," Eudoxus said. "It must seem so obvious. Doctors make population problems worse, yes?"