"They don't think the same way we do about that," Jane said. "You should be safe."
"Should be," I said.
"The alternative is being blasted out of the sky when we show up in Consu space," Crick said.
"I understand," I said. "I just wish I'd been given a little more lead time to get used to the idea."
"It was a rapidly evolving situation," Jane said nonchalantly. And suddenly I got a BrainPal message. Trust me—it said. I looked back at Jane, who was looking placidly at me. I nodded, acknowledging one message while appearing to acknowledge the other.
"What do we do after they're done admiring Lieutenant Perry?" asked Tagore.
"If everything goes according to past encounters, we'll have the opportunity to ask up to five questions of the Consu," Jane said. "The actual number of questions will be determined by a contest involving combat between five of us and five of them. The combat is one on one. The Consu fight unarmed, but our fighters will be allowed knives to compensate for our lack of slashing arms. The one thing to be especially aware of is that in previous cases where we've had this ritual, the Consu we've fought were disgraced soldiers or criminals for whom this battle can restore honor. So needless to say, they're very determined. We get to ask as many questions as the number of contests we win."
"How do you win the contest?" Tagore asked.
"You kill the Consu, or it kills you," Jane said.
"Fascinating," Tagore said.
"One other detail," Jane said. "The Consu pick the combatants from those we bring with us, so protocol requires at least three times the number of selectable combatants. The only exempted member of the delegation is its leader, who is, by courtesy, the one human assumed to be above fighting with Consu criminals and failures."
"Perry, you get to be leader of the delegation," Crick said. "Since you're the one who killed eight thousand of the buggers, by their lights you'd be the natural leader. Also, you're the sole non-Special Forces soldier here, and you lack certain speed and strength modifications the rest of us have. If you were to get picked, you might actually get killed."
"I'm touched you care," I said.
"It's not that," Crick said. "If our star attraction was killed by a lowly criminal, it could jeopardize the chances of getting the Consu to cooperate."
"Okay," I said. "For a second there, I thought you were going soft."
"No chance of that," Crick said. "Now, then. We have forty-three hours until we reach skip distance. There will be forty of us in the delegation, including all platoon and squad leaders. I'll choose the rest from the ranks. That means that each of you will drill your soldiers in hand-to-hand combat between now and then. Perry, I've downloaded the delegation protocols to you; study them and don't screw up. Just after we skip, you and I will meet so I can give you the questions we want to ask, in the order we want to ask them. If we're good, we'll have five questions, but we have to be ready if we need to ask fewer. Let's get to it, people. You're dismissed."
During those forty-three hours, Jane learned about Kathy. Jane would pop into where I was, ask, listen and disappear, off to tend to her duties. It was a strange way to share a life.
"Tell me about her," she asked as I studied the protocol information in a forward lounge.
"I met her when she was in the first grade," I said, and then had to explain what first grade was. Then I told her the first memory I had of Kathy, which was of sharing paste for a construction paper project during the art period the first and second grades shared. How she caught me eating a little of the paste and told me I was gross. How I hit her for saying that, and she decked me in the eye. She got suspended for a day. We didn't speak again until junior high.
"How old are you in the first grade?" she asked.
"Six years old," I said. "As old as you are now."
"Tell me about her," she asked again, a few hours later, in a different place.
"Kathy almost divorced me once," I said. "We had been married for ten years and I had an affair with another woman. When Kathy found out she was furious."
"Why would she care that you had sex with someone else?" Jane asked.
"It wasn't really about the sex," I said. "It was that I lied to her about it. Having sex with someone else only counted as a hormonal weakness in her book. Lying counted as disrespect, and she didn't want to be married to someone who had no respect for her."
"Why didn't you divorce?" Jane asked.
"Because despite the affair, I loved her and she loved me," I said. "We worked it out because we wanted to be together. And anyway, she had an affair a few years later, so I guess you could say we evened up. We actually got along better after that."
"Tell me about her," Jane asked, later.
"Kathy made pies like you wouldn't believe," I told her. "She had this recipe for strawberry rhubarb pie that would knock you on your ass. There was one year where Kathy entered her pie in a state fair contest, and the governor of Ohio was the judge. First prize was a new oven from Sears."
"Did she win?" Jane asked.
"No, she got second, which was a hundred-dollar gift certificate to a bed and bath store. But about a week later she got a phone call from the governor's office. His aide explained to Kathy that for political reasons, he gave the first place award to the wife of an important contributor's best friend, but that ever since the governor had a slice of her pie, he couldn't stop talking about how great it was, so would she please bake another pie for him so he would shut up about the damn pie for once?"
"Tell me about her," Jane asked.
"The first time I knew I was in love with her was my junior year in high school," I said. "Our school was doing a performance of Romeo and Juliet, and she was selected as Juliet. I was the play's assistant director, which most of the time meant I was building sets or getting coffee for Mrs. Amos, the teacher who was directing. But when Kathy started having a little trouble with her lines, Mrs. Amos assigned me to go over them with her. So for two weeks after rehearsals, Kathy and I would go over to her house and work on her lines, although mostly we just talked about other things, like teenagers do. It was all very innocent at the time. Then the play went into dress rehearsal and I heard Kathy speaking all those lines to Jeff Greene, who was playing Romeo. And I got jealous. She was supposed to be speaking those words to me."
"What did you do?" Jane asked.
"I moped around through the entire run of the play, which was four performances between Friday night and Sunday afternoon, and avoided Kathy as much as possible. Then at the cast party on Sunday night Judy Jones, who had played Juliet's nurse, found me and told me that Kathy was sitting on the cafeteria loading dock, crying her eyes out. She thought I hated her because I'd been ignoring her for the last four days and she didn't know why. Judy then added if I didn't go out there and tell Kathy I was in love with her, she'd find a shovel and beat me to death with it."
"How did she know you were in love?" Jane asked.
"When you're a teenager and you're in love, it's obvious to everyone but you and the person you're in love with," I said. "Don't ask me why. It just works that way. So I went out to the loading dock, and saw Kathy sitting there, alone, dangling her feet off the edge of the dock. It was a full moon and the light came down on her face, and I don't think I'd ever seen her more beautiful than she was right then. And my heart was bursting because I knew, I really knew, that I was so in love with her that I could never tell her how much I wanted her."
"What did you do?" Jane asked.
"I cheated," I said. "Because, you know, I had just happened to memorize large chunks of Romeo and Juliet. So, as I walked toward her on the loading dock, I spoke most of Act II, Scene II to her. 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise fair sun . . .' and so on. I knew the words before; it's just this time I actually meant them. And after I was done saying them, I went to her and I kissed her for the first time. She was fifteen and I was sixteen, and I knew I was going to marry her and spend my life with her."