“But you aren’t really crew; you’re just a stupid machine! I—” Sam stopped. While he doubted that the auto-chef would carry out its threats, he didn’t really know the capabilities of this ship and, where galactics were concerned, caution was ever the watchword.
He carried his greenish-yellow pellet and cup of possibly lethal coffee to a table.
“Here’s how I can help you, old boy,” Dratte Five shu-shu-ed when he spotted Sam staring at the nutritious and healthy breakfast pellet in front of him. Dratte pulled itself into a restful position across the table. “Have a luxury cabin, y’know. Place is quite large. Willing to share, y’see. Welcome the company. Er, you won’t eat me, will you?”
“That,” Sam said with a nod at the auto-chef, which was probably keeping a wary LED on him lest he attack, “was a misunderstanding between me and that stupid machine. The only nasty habit that I have is that I snore.” When Dratte Five rubbed its antennae nervously at the strange concept, he quickly added, “Don’t worry, that just means that I make loud noises while I sleep.”
“Good. Nothing to worry about,” Dratte Five said with obvious relief and slapped Sam’s shoulder. “Don’t sleep myself. Nasty habit. Better ways for we Tsith. But glad to help. Consider it done. Now, d’you think the bar’s open?”
Dratte Five’s cabin turned out to be much, much larger than Sam’s. For the hundredth time he wondered at the lengths his agent would go to save a fraction of a glizzatina if the opportunity presented itself. Lord knows, with what she was charging their clients for Sam’s negotiating services, she could arrange better accommodations than those he’d been forced to endure thus far.
To his surprise there was even a human-sized bed—a soft, billowy bed—in the Tsith’s cabin. With pillows even! For a second he worried that he might find himself sleeping side-by-side with Dratte Five and his multiple pairs of Keds. But, hadn’t the friendly alien said that it didn’t sleep? If that was so then why then did it need a cabin? Not that any of that mattered a whit, he realized with a smile, for that meant that he would have the entire bed to himself! He could not believe his luck in finding so charitable an alien as Dratte.
He moved his kit into the cabin within the hour.
Lunch was a brownish pellet (falafel, the auto-chef said nastily) and a fizzy drink that tasted remotely like cola. Dinner was a feast; two (count them) pellets—one brown and the other beige. “Humus and pita,” the auto-chef reported in reply to Sam’s inquiry. “With yogurt.” The small cup of thick liquid was nice and warm.
“Delicious,” Sam said, hoping that by doing so he would prevent the machine from obtaining any pleasure from his reaction to the serving.
As was his custom of late, Sam returned to his former cabin to talk with the truzdls after dinner. It was the only way he could get away from the overly helpful and ever-present Dratte Five. There was such a thing as being too friendly.
Despite occasional prompting by Bunion-of-Hide, the spokesflea for the campers, that he talk to the city fathers up in the mane, Sam protested that he wanted to confine himself to the few truzdls he already knew. “I’d rather not deal with the government types when I’m not working. Somehow I doubt that the bloodsuckers here would be any different from the others I’ve known.” Almost immediately he regretted his choice of words.
“No offense taken,” Bunion assured him. “I feel much the same.”
The ancestors of the truzdls, Sam learned through his new friends, had constructed vast cities that towered over the plains of their native planet. Some of these reared nearly six meters into the heavens and contained millions of inhabitants. Sometime in the dim pre-phloomb, pre-civilized ages, an adventurous group had discovered the peripatetic pleasures that came with populating the blue ox-beasts that wandered their world. Since then an entire mobile truzdl culture had grown up. These groups wandered far and wide, never staying in one place for long. Using these animals they had spread their civilization throughout the world, and beyond.
“I imagine that was your first great age of ox-ploration,” Sam observed. He could practically hear the little flea scouts laughing at his poor pun in the background. Bunion only growled.
As the truzdls described their journeys Sam wondered if the band of interstellar gypsies had developed their own songs and dances. He tried to imagine Bunion and the others playing their little flea fiddles and balalaikas late into the evening. He tired to picture how the flashy-clothed, dashing crowd would appear when glimpsed through a forest of blue ox-hairs, snapping their pincers as their multiple legs beat out a manic staccato to the fierce rhythms of the gypsy music.
And so to bed, for Bingnagia awaited.
Dratte Five seemed to have an unquenchable thirst for two things: the bar’s various brands of glycol and Sam’s business. Of secondary interest were all things having to do with Earth, such as why humanity hadn’t done away with all that nasty water in Earth’s atmosphere and why humans hadn’t adopted phloomb technology earlier. “Your commitment to electromagnetism is so declasse. Ridiculously wasteful,” he said condescendingly. “Such deliberately profligate energy use make you appear to be rubes, backward and ignorant.”
Sam tried to smile, despite the insult—which was also too painfully true.
When he wasn’t probing, Dratte Five regaled Sam with tales of his own travels and adventures, some of which were quite beyond belief. Still, one could never be sure where the line between truth and fiction was: The galaxy was so vast, the worlds so diverse, that everything seemed possible to Sam’s poor, unsophisticated mind.
As best Sam could make out, Dratte Five was some sort of exterminator, making his living by ridding various races of pests. “It must pay well,” he remarked after hearing one amusing bit that might have involved either nuclear bombs or phloomb implosions if the translator was working correctly. The technology and its application to pest control were quite incomprehensible in either case.
“Pays quite well. Few of my clients complain,” Dratte Five replied with a wiggle of its antennae. “And none of the victims,” it added with a grinding rasp of its mandibles.
Sam was surprised by Dratte’s remark. He hadn’t realized that the Tsith had a compassionate core, much less feel pity for the pests he eliminated. He couldn’t recall an Orkin man ever referring to cockroaches as “victims.” Perhaps the Tsith operated on a higher moral plane. Earth could learn a lesson from him.
Dratte Five was quite interested in Sam’s destination, and even more so when he discovered that Sam was to deal with their exalted leader, the M-Ditsch, itself.
“Few outsiders ever get close to the M-Ditsch,” he’d explained. “Bingna-gia’s leader is highly suspicious. Very tight security. Comes to the government compound infrequently. To be expected. Backstabbers, y’know.”
“Backstabbers?” Sam said. “Why should they want to harm their leader?”
Dratte Five leaned close so that his rasps were barely above a faint scratching sound. “Assassin culture, y’know. Every hand against the leader, y’see. Ditsch can’t protect his own back, not much good. Blasted underlings always looking for a chance to better themselves. Nasty fellows, them.”
Suddenly, Sam did not feel confident that this assignment was going to be as simple as Ahbbbb had stated. He would be in the line of fire, so to speak, in a culture that espoused regicide or worse.
“Wish you well. Hope you get through quickly,” Dratte Five went on. “Court’s going to get involved. Rumors abound. In and out fast. That’s my advice.”