I glanced up at the volcano. "Men like Devaro."
Tawni's grip tightened on my arm. "I do not wish war with your people, Stane," she said quietly.
"I don't want it either, Tawni," I said, looking at the Kailth warrior again.
"But it seems to me that the war may have already begun. Whether or not Devaro did this of his own free will, the fact remains that it was the Kailth who provided the calix that tempted him down that path."
"You are correct," the Kailth said. "The war has indeed begun."
Reaching into his armor, he pulled out the pistol he'd taken from me. I caught my breath, feeling Tawni shrink against my side. "But it is not a war against humans," the Kailth continued. "It is a war against meaningless and unnecessary war."
He held up the pistol. "This is such a war, Stane Markand, the war Convocant Devaro sought to create against the Kailthaermil Empire for his own purposes.
It may be stopped thus—"
He grasped the barrel with his other hand, and with a sharp crack of broken gunplastic snapped the weapon in half. A squeeze with the armored hand, and the barrel shattered into splinters.
"Or it may be stopped thus." Reaching into the shattered frame with two fingers, he gave a sharp tug and pulled out the firing pin. "It is a war that must be fought, or many innocent lives will be lost," he said quietly, handing me the pin and what was left of the ruined gun. "Which way would you choose for us to fight it?"
I looked at Tawni. She was gazing back up at me, the skin of her face tight with quiet anxiety. Waiting to see how I would react to all this.
Perhaps waiting to see if she had lost a friend.
"What about Tawni's people?" I asked the Kailth. "Devaro gave his calices away to others. If any of them tries to use them the same way he wanted to, they may come here to get more."
"The Kailthaermil freed us when we had no hope," Tawni said quietly. "To help them free others, we willingly accept the danger."
"Perhaps," the Kailth said, "you can help make them safer."
I looked down the slope, toward the villages below. "Yes," I said. "Perhaps I can."
And with a lot of help, I did. Ten months later, in a precedent-shattering treaty, Quibsh became joint colonial territory of the Kailth and UnEthHu.
Three years after that, convention was again shattered as the humans of Quibsh and Sagtt'a were granted full joint citizenship between the two races. Over those three years, six SkyForce officers and five more Convocants figured out Devaro's brainscan trick and attempted to use the calices to amass power. All of them either died in the attempt or were politically destroyed.
And in the midst of it all, in the greatest miracle of all, Tawni became my wife. And later, of course, your mother.
And so, as we stand here on the eve of the Fifth Joint Kailthaermil-UnEthHu Expedition into the unknown areas of the galaxy, I wanted you to know how my Year of YouthJourneying came out. It was the year I learned about politics and war, about ambition and selflessness, about art and death and love.
The year I grew up.
Our hopes and blessings go with you, my son, as you leave with the expedition tomorrow. May your nineteenth year be as blessed as mine.
With love, Dad.
The Play's the Thing
The whole trouble started when the Fuzhtian ambassador announced that he wanted to see a Broadway play.
Though I suppose you could equally well say the trouble started when those first silent Fuzhtian probes snuggled coyly up behind our geosynchronous TV
satellites and began shipping the signals back home. You might even go back further and say that it all started when Marconi's first radio went on-line and began spewing electromagnetic radiation out into space for everyone to hear.
Oh, well, hell, let's be honest. All of it really started with whoever the bunch of trouble-making Sumerians were who sat around on a rainy Sunday afternoon and invented entertainment.
Because that's really what started the trouble: our vast entertainment industry, and the Fuzhties' maniacal love for it. For a simple example—and this isn't supposed to be noised about—when the Fuzhtian ship landed outside the White House, the "Greetings and Joy to Humankind" line that will be going into the history books were actually his second words to the Secretary-General. His actual first words were an expression of disappointment from his government that Johnny Carson was no longer hosting the "Tonight Show." For those of you who'd always wondered why Carson suddenly came out of retirement right after that to do a one-month stint as guest-host, now you know.
I suppose it could have been worse. No, strike that—it could have been a lot worse. You've heard all the similes: a walking barn door with gorilla arms, a four-hundred-pound bag of blubbery muscle with pinfeathers; a cross between a bull and Doberman on steroids. Even without the kind of technology we know they had, the Fuzhties could have stomped the planet flat as Florida if they'd taken a mind to do so.
Which is why everyone had been falling all over themselves trying to satisfy the ambassador's slightest whim. Partly it was residual fear that he might suddenly stop being congenial and start behaving the way any self-respecting B-movie creature his size ought to; but mainly it was because every national leader on the planet was visibly salivating over the prospect of getting their hands on Fuzhtian technology.
Anyway, at the time the ambassador made his Broadway request he'd been on Earth about six months, getting everything he wanted. And I mean everything. He had the top two floors of an exclusive Washington hotel, specially commissioned airplanes and cars, and three of the premier chefs in Europe. Along the way he'd also collected an astonishingly eclectic entourage, consisting of top US
government officials, a smattering of foreign representatives whose countries had somehow caught his interest—we still don't know how or why he picked the ones he did—and a few oddballs like me. I'd been up on a ladder doing some woodwork repair in the White House when the ambassador apparently expressed some sort of vague approval of me. The next thing I knew I'd been hauled down, poured into a suit and handed a briefcase, and tossed in among the smiling State Department wonks whose job it was to dog the ambassador's size-28 footsteps.
Long afterward I learned that what had captured the ambassador's attention was not me but rather the hammer I'd been using. But by then I'd overheard enough under-the-breath comments about my relative usefulness to the group that sheer native orneriness required me to keep quiet about the error.
Besides, the briefcase they'd handed me that first day had contained a presidential plea for my cooperation and about two bucketfuls of money, both of which I was far too patriotic to walk away from.
But for whatever reason, I was in that elite group. And I'd been with them for about five weeks when, from out of the blue, the ambassador made his request.
We still don't know what prompted him to bring it up at that particular time.
For that matter, we're not even sure how he knew about Broadway, unless he'd picked up a reference from one of those pirate transmissions their probes had been making. But however it happened, there it was, plain as day, that morning on the RebuScope: "Are you sure that's what it means?" Dwight Fogerty, a senior State Department wonk and head of our little group, asked as he peered back and forth between the RebuScope and the tentative translation.
"I don't see what else it could be, sir," chief translator Angus MacLeod said.
He'd been loaned to us by MI6 because he was both a whiz at cryptanalysis and a
huge "Concentration" fan. Angus always called Fogerty "sir" because he was polite, not because Fogerty deserved it. "It's clearly 'eye w-ant two cee a br-rod-weigh' something. What else but play?"
"Well, who says that scale thing is 'weigh?' " Fogerty countered. "Maybe it's