"The worst part of it is, now that I've been around Foitani a while, I can almost see the logic in that." Jennifer started to say something more, but found herself yawning instead.
"You may have more privacy aboard one of their ships, or in the spaceport," Greenberg said. "You'd certainly have more room. This isn't a big ship at all."
"If you want me to leave, I will. Otherwise I'd sooner stay here," Jennifer said. "I don't need a whole lot of privacy from you, do I? After all, we've flown together before."
"I'll set you up with a foam pad in the storeroom." Greenberg spread his hands. "I'm sorry, but that's the best I can do if you want any room to yourself."
"Drag the pad in here tonight, would you? After getting lifted the way I did, just being close to somebody human will feel good. I don't think you're going to molest me."
Greenberg grinned lopsidedly. "Tempting as the notion is?no." He rummaged in a compartment, pulled out the promised foam pad. Except for being smaller, it was identical to the one on which she had awakened inside the Foitani ship. Greenberg rummaged some more, let out a grunt of triumph. "I thought I had a spare pillow in here. And here's a blanket, too."
Jennifer took them. "Thanks. But do you know what the biggest pleasure being aboard your ship will be for me?" Without waiting for Greenberg to reply, she went on, "Having a toilet that fits my behind."
He laughed at that. "Yes, I've seen what the Foitani use. They'd be especially bad for you, wouldn't they?" He waved toward the refresher cubicle. "Help yourself."
"I don't mind if I do." She hesitated, then asked, "You wouldn't by any chance have tampons or anything like that?"
"I don't know if there are any in the sanitary supplies or not. I never needed to find out until now."
"Well, if you don't, I suppose I can improvise something or other. I did it once; I can do it again."
When she got out, Greenberg went in. She stripped down to her underpants, gave her grimy outfit an unhappy look, and then brightened?the Harold Meeker would be able to get clothes clean, not just stir the dirt around as she had been doing. She slid under the blanket.
Greenberg surprised her by stooping next to the foam pad and reaching out to touch her shoulder. She stiffened. Was he going to make advances now? She'd made love with him a few times on their first trip together, on the way home from L'Rau. But this was not the right time, not for her. She tried to figure out how to tell him that without hurting him or making him angry.
But all he wanted was to apologize again. "Jennifer, I'm so sorry. You should be back on your campus, doing what you wanted to do."
"It can't be helped," she said. Her dreams of elaborate revenge had collapsed when she found out how the Foitani learned of her, and from whom. While they lasted, though, they'd helped sustain her. With nothing in their place, she felt very tired. "Just let me sleep."
"Fair enough." Greenberg rose; Jennifer's eyes closed even as he did so. She heard cloth whisper when he pulled off his coveralls, then the muffled sound his body made pressing against the sofa bed. He must have touched the light switch, for the darkness behind her eyelids got blacker. "Good night," he said.
She thought she answered him, but she was never sure afterward.
Dargnil Dargnil Lin stood in front of a workstation. It had all the elements of the ones with which Jennifer was familiar?holoscreen, mike, keyboard, and printer?yet was in aggregate nothing like them. The Foitani had their own engineering traditions, which owed nothing to those of mankind.
"I suppose you will want to begin with our records pertaining to the Great Unknown," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said.
"I'd rather have more background first, if I could," Jennifer answered. "Can you show me something basic and general about your race as it was before the Suicide Wars?"
"Your time for research is limited." The translator was expressionless as always, but Jennifer thought she heard a sniff in the Foitan's voice. She looked up at him without saying anything. He bared his teeth at her. She kept waiting. At last he said, "Let it be as you wish, then." He spoke to the workstation. The screen lit. Dargnil Dargnil Lin said, "This is a history such as our adolescents use."
"Good." The video had more text to it than a comparable human one would have used, and Jennifer could not read the Foitani written language. But there were still plenty of pictures, and Dargnil Dargnil Lin's translator turned the soundtrack into Spanglish for her. She watched and listened and spoke low-voiced notes into her computer.
On a historical star atlas, she watched the empire of the Great Ones spread. The sound track attributed their unbroken run of success to their inherent superiority over all the races they encountered. She wondered whether the species was biologically programmed to think that way, the Foitani of Odern were imitating their ancestors, or if they were projecting their own attitudes back onto the Great Ones.
A few minutes of watching made her toss out that last possibility. The Foitani of long ago had definitely been in the habit of killing off races that proved obstreperous. They did not bother to hide or even to go out of the way to justify genocide; they simply went about it, with second thoughts as few and far between as if they were swatting flies.
"Can you stop the tape for a moment?" Jennifer said. Dargnil Dargnil Lin could. Jennifer asked him, "Would your people act that way again if you were strong enough?"
"Probably," he said. "We have not reached the heights the Great Ones achieved, however, and races such as your own appear more potent than any they faced. Thus we have had to begin to learn to treat with other species rather than simply rolling over them. It is not easy for us."
Jennifer bit back the sardonic retort that automatically came to mind. The Foitani could not help being what they were. Expecting aliens to act like humans was the easiest way for a trader to get into trouble. Moreover, mankind could not boast a spotless record among the stars, though humans had perpetrated their worst acts of savagery on themselves.
The same seemed true of the Foitani. The screen Jennifer was watching suddenly turned a dazzling white. She staggered back, hands to her eyes, as if caught by the blast of a real explosion. When she looked again, a phrase in the Foitani written language filled the screen. "The Suicide Wars," Dargnil Dargnil Lin read for her.
"I'd suspected that, yes," Jennifer murmured. Far more rapidly than it had grown, the Foitani empire crumbled. Most of the stars that had filled the holovid map went dark. A handful, scattered at random across two or three thousand light-years, kept glowing red. An even smaller handful burned with a yellow light.
"Those yellow dots are the worlds of our species that have relearned starflight," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said. "On the red, Foitani also survive, but in a state of savagery."
"But why did it happen?" Jennifer asked. "What made you fight like that?" The tape hadn't offered a clue; its narration merely recorded the event without analyzing what had brought it on.
"I cannot answer for certain, nor could anyone else on Odern," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said. "There are speculations, but who can truly hope to see into the minds of the Great Ones? Only when we can match their deeds will we be worthy to comprehend their thoughts."
Jennifer's mouth twisted in discontent. The Foitani were too busy venerating their past to try seriously to understand it. "May I speak without causing offense through ignorance of your customs?" she asked, one of the standard questions every trader learned.
"Speak," Dargnil Dargnil Lin said.
"If the Great Ones were as magnificent in every way as you make them out to be, why did they ever go and fight the Suicide Wars in the first place?"