Disgust and anger with himself welled up inside him. So this was all it had been worth, all those years of his painting and theorizing and working? Nothing more than something he could forget in a minute, once he was given a new, strong, two-armed body to play at fighting with, under rules that guaranteed he could not be badly hurt or killed?
What had happened to him?
For that matter, what had happened to the purpose for which he had been brought here? Had he been physically rebuilt, charged with the hopes of a world of people, and shipped out here to the edge of the intergalactic dark just so that he could come to this ship and roll on the deck fighting with equally charged members of other races like his own?
If so, there was something the Center Aliens had not told him—something suspicious and potentially rotten about this whole business of the Silver Horde and the Battle Line.
But whatever it was, beginning now, he was going to make it his business to find it out. Meanwhile, he told himself grimly, he would not be tricked again into losing his emotional perspective.
He would remember that inside this superbly healthy and unkillable body with two strong arms was still the mind and identity of the thin, tense, one-armed human named Miles Vander. Miles Vander, who had a people to save and paintings to paint. He would remember he was not here to fight Chak’has. He was here to fight the Silver Horde, if the Silver Horde honestly existed, not to struggle for some position in a physical pecking order aboard this one small ship.
Perhaps the Center Aliens were not to blame, and it was just that the other racial representatives aboard had not been able to remember that. Perhaps, isolated and waiting here, they had done their best to keep in mind the original purpose that had brought them here and had still failed, giving in at last to the boredom and loneliness of their situation, surrounded by strangers of races other than their own.
He, however, would not be breaking like that. Now that he had been awakened to the danger, he felt the old, inflexible determination that had become part of him back on Earth hardening like spring steel inside him.
He would never break, because he was not like his fellow alien crew members on this ship—not like anyone else in the universe. He was Miles Vander, who had a special personal memory of loneliness and years of striving to make sure he would not give in.
7
The tiger-faced head of Chak’ha rolled upon the bunk—rolled away from the gaze of Miles. Clearly Chak’ha did not want to talk about it.
Miles had come back to the room of the ship in which he had awakened. Chak’ha was still there, lying on his bunk. But when Miles had started to question him about the pecking order, the combats, and the relationship of all this to the coming of the Silver Horde, he had felt unhappiness rising from the lax body of the alien like a cloud of sickness.
“There’s just nothing to do,” Chak’ha said, looking away from him now, looking at the blank inner wall of his bunk. “There’s just nothing else to do.”
“Nothing to do but fight with each other?” Miles demanded. “No training to be done? No practicing with our weapons? No practicing with the ship itself? What kind of fighting ship is this?”
“It isn’t a fighting ship,” said Chak’ha to the wall. “It’s the Fighting Rowboat.”
“The Fighting Rowboat?”
“That’s what we all call her,” muttered Chak’ha.
Miles stared at him. In their common shipboard language, the name Chak’ha had just given the ship was a bitter sneer at the vessel and all those aboard her. The name connoted not only worthlessness, but puffed-up, bragging worthlessness—as if someone whose duty it was to fight should be nicknamed the Ferocious Mouse. Chak’ha remained with his face turned away, offering no further explanation.
“Look at me!” ordered Miles. Slowly, reluctantly, the tiger mask turned back to confront him.
“What do you mean, this isn’t a fighting ship?” demanded Miles.
“I mean what I say,” said Chak’ha stubbornly. “This ship will never fight anything—let alone the Silver Horde.”
“How do you know?”
“Everybody knows,” said Chak’ha with a sullen air of hopelessness. “Everybody on the ship knows. We began to know it when we found out they didn’t care what happened to us or what we did here.”
“Who didn’t care? The Center Aliens?” said Miles.
“Them. All the others in this Battle Line,” said Chak’ha. “It’s plain they don’t care. It became plain to the first few of us who arrived here. Wait. You’ll see. You’ll find out that it makes no difference to them what happens to us—except that we aren’t allowed to kill each other when we fight. You saw how you and I were stopped.”
“Well, if we aren’t here to fight the Silver Horde, what are we here for?” said Miles harshly.
“Who knows?” replied Chak’ha gloomily. “I suppose the Center Aliens know, but they’re not likely to tell us.”
“Nobody—no one aboard this ship knows?” demanded Miles.
Chak’ha, without moving upon his bunk, gave the impression of shrugging to Miles’ emotion-sensitive perceptions.
“Maybe some of the higher-up ones here know,” he said. “Maybe Eff”—the name was a sound like the letter f prolonged and ending in a sharp whistle—“who’s second. Or Luhon, who can beat anybody aboard. Maybe somebody like that knows. I don’t.”
“Which one’s Luhon?” demanded Miles. “I’ll ask him.”
Chak’ha’s head rolled on the bunk, negatively.
“He won’t tell you.”
“Never mind that,” said Miles. “Tell me which one he is.”
“He’s thin and quick and gray-skinned,” said Chak’ha in a lifeless voice, “and his external ears are pointed.”
Without a further word, Miles turned and went out of the room. He reentered the lounge and studied its occupants, but none of them fitted the description Chak’ha had given him. He turned and went back through the ship, searching through the other crew quarters—at least those rooms of which the doors were not closed. Still he met nobody fitting the description he had been given. Finally, he turned and went forward. There, alone in the bow control room, he saw a slight, gray-skinned, furless individual with ears that would have fitted well on a pixie or elf out of Earth’s legends. Whoever he was, if he was Luhon, he looked like a light-bodied, harmless being to have outfought everybody else aboard the ship. Miles studied him for a second, watching him from the doorway of the control room. The other was playing with the keys on a control console. He ignored Miles, as all aboard had ignored him, and Miles was able to notice how smoothly and swiftly the fingers of the other moved. For all his apparent slightness of limb, he must have muscle if he topped the pecking order, Miles concluded, and if suppleness and his ordinary speed of movement were any index, it might be that his speed was really remarkable. It was hard to believe that this slim creature sitting before him could be at the head of the social system aboard the ship. Still, Miles reminded himself, for all his ferocious appearance, Chak’ha had turned out to be least of them all. Appearances plainly were no index to the dangerousness of his fellow crew members.
Miles went forward into the room until he stood just behind the other individual, who appeared to be checking out the console of the control board before him. Glancing at that control board now, Miles was surprised, for a fleeting second, to discover that he understood its controls as well as he understood the common language they spoke aboard the ship. Then he swung his attention back to his reason for coming here.
“Are you Luhon?’ he demanded.