Manyface was lying beside her, face-to-face, his eyes closed. They opened slowly, and he looked into hers. He did not speak for a moment, and then there was faint disappointment in his tone. "Ah, I see. I wondered why you were doing this." She started to speak—to lie, out of embarrassment and apology, but he wouldn't let her. "Please, whisper as softly as you can. No, it doesn't matter about why." The eyes, soft under the bulging forehead, were understanding. Then they hardened. "What we must do," he said, "is make these people believe we have taken their side. Cause them to trust us."
"Yes," agreed Delilah, moving slightly. The motion made Manyface remove the hand that had remained resting lightly on her hip, and she wished it were still there. "And then? After we've won their trust, if we can?"
Manyface said soberly, "Then there is still almost no hope that we can prevent the war, but what choice do we have but to try?"
The good thing about their impossible task was that the erk experience of war, though vast, was incomplete. To them "war" meant actual combat. It meant the destruction of cities, the killing of enemies, even the annihilation of planets. It meant nothing else. Espionage and dirty tricks were not in their repertory. If the Living Gods had also known the arts of espionage and betrayal of trust, they had failed to teach them to the erks. And so there was no problem for Tsoong Delilah or Manyface in doing what they wished to do. Jutch accepted Manyface un-questioningly into the planning section, and A-Belinka welcomed Delilah to weapons training. Gladly, in fact, for she became at once his star pupil.
There was much to learn! The erks had weaponry Delilah had not imagined. Not merely missiles, lasers, heavy-particle beams, artillery, hand weapons—it was more than any individual weapon, it was the system in which each weapon played a part. Over the stretch of eight thousand years the erks had acquired the military technology of nine separate civilizations. Of course, much of it was not applicable to the task of liberating the U. S. of A. from its oppressors: the sonic grenades that wrought such havoc among the arachnids who had invented them would only give human beings headaches.
But nearly all the rest of the armorarium was terrible.
Delilah did not let herself feel terror. Weapons were weapons. She had craftsman's pride in her skills. She took great satisfaction from the fact that starting from nowhere, she quickly excelled every erk, every Yank, and every Real-American but Miranda in gunnery. She was a natural. It was not simply a matter of calculating deflections for targets. It was a more primitive and deadly thing. Even on the erks' range—even where the targets were sometimes Han Chinese rockets and sometimes the ruffed needles that the Living Gods had flown and sometimes the spheres or teardrops or polygons of the other races the erks had "helped"—even with ion-beams or EMP grenades or slashing, shrapneling rockets that punctured shells—even there, what made the difference between the talented gunlayer and the champion was the will to destroy.
That Delilah had.
It was an annoyance to Delilah that she could not quite surpass Miranda even at destruction, but she took glum pleasure in noticing that Castor was unable to match either of the women in gunnery. His special skill was something else. To Delilah's surprise, the boy was a natural pilot. He did not have much to pilot, only drones at first, airborne ones in World's soggy atmosphere to begin with, then orbiting minimini spacecraft, no more really than a telemetry system on top of a fuel tank. But he had the gift. His long hours at the teaching screens had supplied what natural talents could not provide, and he was able to read a navigation signal, verify a proposed course-change solution, and execute a maneuver as smoothly and surely as Delilah, with all her long years of experience. And then they gave him an Eye! A real, Earth-system spy drone, launched through the gate and sent down to near-Earth orbit to keep an eye on the Han Chinese and all their works. It was the culmination of all his dreams! He had a spaceship of his own! He could make it go where he liked! It thrilled him so that Delilah found herself thrilling for him, and one afternoon when pilotage training was over she followed him out the door of the shed and across the tarmac. "Come back here, boy," she called good-naturedly. "I won't hurt you."
He turned and saw her, flushing. "Oh, Delilah," he said. "I thought—I was thinking—"
"Yes? You were thinking what? That I planned to tear off your clothes here, in front of our little friends?" For, of course, they were as usual followed by a posse of dumb erks.
"I was thinking I might see you later," he finished.
"Oh, yes, if the old woman wants to make love you will accommodate her," said Delilah and listened to herself and did not like what she heard. It was that cursed Miranda, she thought. Miranda made her jealous. She did not want to be jealous, she only wanted to have a quite reasonable sexual relationship with the young man and prevent him from wasting himself on foolish young women or the hungry harpies of the Yankees... She listened to herself think and did not like what she thought, either. "Castor," she said, humbly, or as close to humbly as Tsoong Delilah knew how to get, "I just wanted to talk to you."
He looked at her appraisingly. What he saw in her face she could not tell, but he said, "Sure, Delilah." Then he grinned. "I was just going to watch the kids play. Do you want to come along?"
"Come along where?" she demanded, looking about. The only place on this side of the tarmac was the Yankee nest, and she had already seen that many times. Too many times; the hostility these Amazon warriors had shown her was not pleasant.
"You'll see," he said; and she did.
It was the nest. It was the school outside the nest. It was the children, the girls from tiny three-year-olds to young teens, the trainee conquerors. They walked into the schoolroom, and the teaching sisters beamed welcome at Castor, gave guarded looks of suspicion to Delilah, raised warning fingers to their mouths for both. The children were rapt before a prismed screen where war games were being played. On the screen, models—Delilah thought at first they were models, then realized with a heart-stopping shock that they were films of reality— ships were in battle, huge ships, planet-busters, crushers. A fleet of them slid across the screen toward a violet-and-brown planet, and although an intervening screen of defensive vessels attacked them and destroyed some and committed suicide by hurling themselves into some, the defenders were outgunned and outmassed. The planet-busters got through.
And the planet was destroyed.
Delilah fled outside, for in that long-ago, now-gone planet what she saw was the Earth.
In a while Castor joined her, followed by the chattering children and, of course, the squeaking, excited dumb erks; but this time some of the dumb erks were there for a purpose. "What now?" Delilah demanded, and Castor looked fond and indulgent.
"They play their game," he said. "Just watch."
The girls knew the game. So did the erks. They needed very little instruction from the teaching sisters as they descended on a rank of toy carts at the side of a mossy lawn. Each cart had a dumb erk driver; and when the erks had hopped into their seats and the carts had drawn themselves up in orderly squadrons, the game began. For each girl in the school a cart and an erk to man it; the erks were trained (as Earthly dogs are trained) to carry out voice commands from their mistresses... And the game began. They attacked each other in fleets and single-cart sallies, bashing into each other with gleeful yips and squeals. The girls shouted orders; the erks carried them out. Smash! Bash! The kids were having fun.
Castor, too, was having fun, Delilah saw. The erks ran the brightly colored toy tanks and self-propelled cannon; the girls controlled the erks; but Castor appointed himself general of them all. Both sides! "Bring up your right wing," he ordered. "Watch that attack in the center! Go on, smash through, smash through!" Pop went one of the cannon, and a dumb erk leaped out of his tank, chittering and squealing as he ran off the battlefield. A trickle of purplish dye from the toy cannon shell stained the ground behind him. Castor turned to grin at Delilah. "Isn't this a good game?" he demanded. "We never had games like this in my school."