“Whoa there, son. Won’t be any vacation for you. You’ve got to play the decadent Terran nogoodnik. Mustn’t disappoint their expectations. Besides, it improves your chances. Keep your eyes and ears open, sure, but forget the rule about keeping your mouth shut. Babble. Ask questions. Foolish ones, mainly; and be damned sure not to get so inquisitive they suspect you of playing spy.”
Flandry frowned. “Uh … sir, I’d look odd if I didn’t grab after information. Thing to do, I should guess, is be clumsy and obvious about it.”
“Good. You catch on fast. I wish you were experienced, but—Nu, everybody has to start sometime, and I’m afraid you will not run into anything too big for a pup to handle. So go get yourself some experience.”
Abrams watched the boy bustle off, and a sigh gusted from him. By and large, after winking at a few things, he felt he’d have been proud to have Dominic Flandry for a son. Though not likely to hit any pay dirt, this trip would further test the ensign’s competence. If he proved out well, then probably he must be thrown to the wolves by Abrams’ own hand.
Because events could not be left on dead zero as long as Brechdan wished. The situation right now carried potentials which only a traitor would fail to exploit. Nonetheless, the way matters had developed, with the mission detained on Merseia for an indefinite period, Abrams could not exploit them as he had originally schemed. The classically neat operation he had had in mind must be turned into an explosion.
And Flandry was the fuse.
Like almost every intelligent species, the Merseians had in their past evolved thousands of languages and cultures. Finally, as in the case of Terra, one came to dominate the others and slowly absorb them into itself. But the process had not gone as far on Merseia. The laws and customs of the lands bordering the Wilwidh Ocean were still a mere overlay on some parts of the planet. Eriau was the common tongue, but there were still those who were less at home in it than in the languages they had learned from their mothers.
Perhaps this was why Lannawar Belgis had never risen above yqan—CPO, Flandry translated—and was at the moment a sort of batman to the group. He couldn’t even pronounce his rating correctly. The sound rendered by q, approximately kdh where dh = th as in “the,” gave him almost as much trouble as it did an Anglic speaker. Or perhaps he just wasn’t ambitious. For certainly he was able, as his huge fund of stories from his years in space attested. He was also a likeable old chap.
He sat relaxed with the Terran and Tachwyr the Dark, whose rank of mei answered somewhat to lieutenant j.g. Flandry was getting used to the interplay of formality and ease between officers and enlisted personnel in the Merseian service. Instead of the mutual aloofness on Terran ships, there was an intimacy which the seniors led but did not rigidly control, a sort of perpetual dance.
“Aye, foreseers,” Lannawar rumbled, “yon was a strange orb and glad I was to see the last of it. Yet somehow, I know not, ours was never a lucky ship afterward. Nothing went ever wholly right, you track me? Speaking naught against captain nor crew, I was glad for transfer to the Bedh-Ivrich. Her skipper was Runei the Wanderer, and far did he take us on explores.”
Tachwyr’s tailtip jerked and he opened his mouth. Someone was always around to keep a brake on Lannawar’s garrulousness. Flandry, who had sat half drowsing, surged to alertness. He beat Tachwyr by a millisecond in exclaiming: “Runei? The same who is now Fodaich on Starkad?”
“Why … aye, believe so, foreseer.” Eyes squinched in the tattooed face across the table. A green hand scratched the paunch where the undress tunic bulged open. “Not as I know much. Heard naught of Starkad ere they told me why you Terrans is come.”
Flandry’s mind went into such furious action that he felt each of the several levels on which it was operating. He had to grab whatever lead chance had offered him after so many fruitless days; he must fend off Tachwyr’s efforts to wrench the lead away from him, for a minute or two anyhow; at the same time, he must maintain his role. (Decadent, as Abrams had suggested, and this he had enjoyed living up to whenever his escorts took him to some place of amusement. But not fatuous; he had quickly seen that he’d get further if they respected him a little and were not bored by his company. He was naïve, wide-eyed, pathetically hoping to accomplish something for Mother Terra, simultaneously impressed by what he saw here. In wry moments he admitted to himself that this was hardly a faked character.) On lower levels of consciousness, excitement opened the sensory floodgates.
Once more he noticed the background. They sat, with a bench for him, in a marble pergola intricately arabesqued and onion-domed. Tankards of bitter ale stood before them. Merseian food and drink were nourishing to a Terran, and often tasty. They had entered this hilltop restaurant (which was also a shrine, run by the devotees of a very ancient faith) for the view and for a rest after walking around in Dalgorad. That community nestled below them, half hidden by lambent flowers and deep-green fronds, a few small modern buildings and many hollowed-out trees which had housed untold generations of a civilized society. Past the airport lay a beach of red sand. An ocean so blue it was nearly black cast breakers ashore; their booming drifted faint to Flandry on a wind that smelled cinnamon. Korych shone overhead with subtropical fierceness, but the moons Wythna and Lythyr were discernible, like ghosts.
Interior sensations: muscles drawn tight in thighs and belly, bloodbeat in the eardrums, chill in the palms. No feeling of excess weight; Merseian gravity was only a few percent above Terra’s. Merseian air, water, biochemistry, animal and plant life, were close parallels to what man had evolved among. By the standards of either world, the other was beautiful.
Which made the two races enemies. They wanted the same kind of real estate.
“So Runei himself was not concerned with the original missions to Starkad?” Flandry asked.
“No, foreseer. We surveyed beyond Rigel.” Lannawar reached for his tankard.
“I imagine, though,” Flandry prompted, “from time to time when space explorers got together, as it might be in a tavern, you’d swap yarns?”
“Aye, aye. What else? ’Cept when we was told to keep our hatches dogged about where we’d been. Not easy, foreseer, believe you me ’tis not, when you could outbrag the crew of ’em save ’tis a Naval secret.”
“You must have heard a lot about the Betelgeuse region, regardless.”
Lannawar raised his tankard. Thereby he missed noticing Tachwyr’s frown. But he did break the thread, and the officer caught the raveled end deftly.
“Are you really interested in anecdotes, Ensign? I fear that our good yqan has nothing else to give you.”
“Well, yes, Mei, I am interested in anything about the Betelgeuse sector,” Flandry said. “After all, it borders on our Empire. I’ve already served there, on Starkad, and I daresay I will again. So I’d be grateful for whatever you care to tell me.”
Lannawar came up for air. “If you yourself, Yqan, were never there, perhaps you know someone who was. I ask for no secrets, of course, only stories.”
“Khr-r-r.” Lannawar wiped foam off his chin. “Not many about. Not many what have fared yonderways. They’re either back in space, or they’ve died. Was old Ralgo Tamuar, my barracks friend in training days. He was there aplenty. How he could lie! But he retired to one of the colonies, let me see now, which one?”
“Yqan Belgis.” Tachwyr spoke quietly, with no special inflection, but Lannawar stiffened. “I think best we leave this subject. The Starkadian situation is an unfortunate one. We are trying to be friends with our guest, and I hope we are succeeding, but to dwell on the dispute makes a needless obstacle.” To Flandry, with sardonicism: “I trust the ensign agrees?”