“Oh, Michael!” Sharon snapped.
“Oh, Sharon!” Mike replied.
“So, which one do we leave? Oh, God dammit honey! How do you make a choice like that?” Her face in the lamplight was pinched and suddenly very old.
“Fortunately that is one decision we don’t have to make. When the program was designed they decided that that was one decision not worth leaving to the affected personnel. Fleet will decide for us and the choice is not open for discussion. It shouldn’t affect either of our kids but if one of them had a genetic defect, no matter how the parents felt, that one would not be the one to go. Part of the purpose is to move a good quality human gene pool off Earth and to do so without there being real cause for argument. On the other hand — since the fleet is being drawn from the ranks of navies — it is heavily skewing the gene pool to northern Europeans. That was an item for discussion and still is. I don’t think that it is going to change, though, no matter how much the Chinese call it racist.”
“Is it?” Sharon was willing to digress. It was better than thinking about the situation.
“I don’t think so, although don’t ask me to analyze Darhel psychology. They are remarkably labyrinthine and I am altogether too blunt; I can’t even start to get a handle on them. I wish I could, because I think it’s the most important thing anyone could be doing right now, even more important than preparing for the Posleen.”
“Why is understanding the Darhel important, and how could it be more important than preparing for the Posleen? I mean, they’ve been pretty up front, letting us send delegations off world and giving material help, now even offering off-planet evacuation for dependents. I think they’ve been fairly nice. You can’t expect them to spend all their energy defending us.”
“Oh yes I can. We are, basically, the Darhel’s only option for pulling their irons out of the fire and they know it. So they should put Earth first in line for everything, to preserve the soldier pool if for no other reason, but they haven’t. Why? At the end of this war, by the best case scenarios I have seen, our available fighting force is going to be reduced by seventy to ninety percent. Those are the humans that the Darhel really depend on and they have not made every effort to preserve them.”
“Well, there’s more to the Federation than the Darhel. Politics can mess things up; maybe some of the Federation doesn’t agree with that analysis.”
“The Darhel, I am convinced, control everything in the Federation. Every time there is a discussion of intent, the Darhel send a representative. You can gauge whether a meeting is worth attending on the basis of whether the Darhel will be there or not. And, often, they subtly guide the meetings I’ve attended.
“So, if you have one group that is probably working off a game plan at all the meetings where decisions are made subtly guiding the meetings to the decisions that they want? You’d better know what their purpose is.
“And I question some of the basic premises that are used to arrive at the question of funding our defense. The Darhel keep talking about a free and equal federation among the stars, but it is always the Darhel talking, or occasionally a carefully chosen Tchpth. The Darhel control all the monetary transfers, all the loans. Among the Galactics there is no charity; if the Darhel call your loan, you’re doomed, and the Darhel are absolutely hierarchical. If you piss off one Darhel they pass it through the chain and you never get the chance to piss off another. These are the people we’ve been getting ninety percent of our information from, including the information about planetary defense funding, required allocation of Fleet resources and availability of off-planet manufacturing capacity.”
“I think you’re getting a little paranoid. The Galactics seem fine from my perspective,” Sharon disagreed.
“Maybe. Maybe my paranoia is hereditary. But Jack wanted me because I was a science fiction writer. Any good science fiction buff knows the story ‘To Serve Man.’ ”
“I don’t.”
“For shame. Real fifties story. Aliens land and start to help the human race. Better nutrition, end war, population control. They all carry this little book, they say the title is To Serve Man. One of the characters is a linguist trying to translate their language. All he has to work with is one copy of the book. End of the story a fortunate few are invited to go to the aliens’ planet. Linguist finally translates the book. It’s a cookbook.”
“Uck. Besides, what’s the point? I thought the Darhel were vegetarians.”
“All our translations are through the AIDs, programmed by the Darhel. All the information we have from off planet is through the Darhel. All the important decisions I have been witness to are influenced by the Darhel. I suspect they are involved in virtually all decisions relating to how to fight the war, and some extremely poor decisions are being reached. I know, the way they avoid being photographed you’ve probably never gotten a good look at one. Trust me, they may only eat vegetables, but they are not designed as herbivores. The Darhel are intelligent and pragmatic, so, why the bad decisions?”
“What kind of bad decisions?”
“All sorts. Hell, the current choice for Joint Chiefs, the future ‘High Commander,’ is a weasel!”
“Mike, gimme a break! The Darhel don’t choose the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”
“You would be amazed what the Darhel have influence over.”
“Isn’t anyone, I don’t know, cross-checking the assumptions? Looking at the Darhel?”
“Yeah, there’s a supposedly black project doing just that, but that’s another thing: with very few exceptions the guys I’ve met who are on that project couldn’t find their ass with both hands. Now a project that is arguably the most fundamental intelligence requirement we have should have the best and brightest, not the incompetent nincompoops that have been assigned.”
“Are you being… well, you can be kind of over-critical… occasionally.”
“I can be a class-A son of a bitch is what you mean. Honey, one of the guys asked whether we could just perform an amphibious invasion of Diess, I shit you not. He did not quite seem to grasp, among other things, that space is a vacuum, that lasers travel in a more or less straight line and that Earth is curved. Either David Hume, who is the project manager, is a great actor, or he is one of the most remarkably stupid persons on Earth.”
Lieutenant Commander David Hume twisted his Annapolis ring twice and scratched the back of his head. His chief linguist, Mark Jervic, arguing a minor note of Tchpth declension with his assistant, paid absolutely no attention. After a moment Jervic nodded his head vigorously to some point or another and waved his arms wildly as if including the whole universe in a unanimity of linguistic holism.
After lunch at a local delicatessen, Commander Hume walked to the Washington Mall and turned towards the Capitol along Independence Avenue. A bitter north wind was blowing down the mall, whipping the skeletal branches of the cherry trees back and forth in a way that was frankly ominous. He watched them for a moment wondering why they bothered him so. Finally, he realized that they reminded him of a line from Dante’s Inferno. The shiver that swept over him then had little to do with the bitter Christmas cold.
When he was opposite the reflecting pool he turned into the mall and walked over. A moment later he was joined by Doctor Jervic, and the two ambled along the path to the Vietnam Memorial, just two more lunchtime strollers walking off their pastrami.