He didn't know. You could not talk about such things with a Turtle, and no human being seemed interested. If he had any sense, he reflected, he would forget about these old lecture chips and concentrate on his real life here in the compound, working for the Turtles. Certainly the Turtles would prefer it if he stopped.
And that was the main reason Sork Quintero was so doggedly insistent on going on.
He rubbed the memo disk scar at the back of his skull reflectively. Listening to the old lecture chips wasn't like using the memo disks the Turtles supplied their most trusted employees. In some ways, listening to the old human-made chips was better. You had a different kind of headache when it was over. Most of all, you could actually remember what was on the chip after you finished playing it. At least, you could if you were lucky. If you played it over often enough. If you could figure out what all the strange old words meant.
As to understanding all the strange things they said, on the other hand—
He shook his head ruefully. Understanding the meaning of all this talk of "cosmologies" (whatever they were) and "universes" (as though there could be more than one!)—that was another matter entirely. He wondered if he would ever comprehend just what the old human scientists were trying to explain—or if he could ever be sure that they did mean something, instead of just being some silly pre-Turtle superstition, as the Turtles insisted—when they would discuss the subject at all.
Sork scratched his chin rebelliously. These centuries-old human scientists were not slaves to superstition! They had built a great civilization, with no help from Turtles or anyone else. His own grandfather's grandfather had seen it!—had lived in that exclusively human world of high technology and freedom, without Turtles, without Taurs, just men and women living and working together in peace and democracy. . . .
Sork stopped himself there out of fairness, for, as the woman he loved was in the habit of pointing out to him, that wholly human world had not been all that peaceful, or even all that democratic.
Reminded of her existence, Sork glanced at his watch. Sue-ling Quong should be coming off duty now, and with his twin brother, Kiri, still abed he could have her all to himself for the hour or so before his own shift started.
Sork thought briefly of breakfast, then gave up the idea and headed across the compound toward the hospital. Working under the memo disk for the Turtles was stressful enough; coupled with the fact that his head ached already, it would be better to tackle it on an empty stomach.
What Sork did for the Turtles was a form of bookkeeping. His job was to handle complex questions of loading the linear induction cars that swarmed up the space ladder. His choices determined the routing of cargoes to one of the three skyhook landing areas—not the nearest, necessarily, but the one with the most current available capacity.
At least, Sork thought that was what he did. He could never really remember what he did under the memo disk. He knew that he was tracking some "values" for the Turtles, but what those values were exactly he could not say.
Yet, the Turtles seemed easy enough to understand—if you took what they said of themselves at face value. Their philosophy was mercantile. They didn't believe in conquest, only in trade. They did, of course, write the rules their trading went by.
Trade they certainly did. Overhead the great space ladder, the Turdes' stairway to the stars, sloped off toward the south and invisibility. As always, there were a dozen cars sliding up and down its cables. Sork looked up at it with his jaw set. Some day, he promised himself, some day he would be in one of those cars, heading out into space the way humans used to do before the Turtles came along. . . .
"Watch it, stupid!" a hoarse human voice shouted.
Sork brought himself up short on the edge of the railroad tracks. A long train of flatcars was coming into the Turtle compound. A uniformed guard, not a memmie—not even a memmie, Sork thought—was scowling at him. "Don't slow the train down!" he barked.
Sork didn't answer. He stood there, more or less patiently, while the train clanked and rattled slowly past. Each car held a rusted, evil-looking chunk of metal. Sork thought he knew what they were: tanks and cannon, old, almost forgotten instruments of war. The kind of thing the Turtles had made unnecessary for humans to have ever again.
It wasn't unusual to see such ancient artifacts come in for shipment up the ladder to orbit. It only meant that somewhere on the Earth the Turtles had ferreted out another old armory and politely, insistently, had made a deal to buy its contents for shipment to wherever they forged such things to their own purposes.
Really, the whole compound was a junkyard. Turtles didn't care about appearances. If, here and there, you could see a few patches of greenery you could be sure that they were nothing to do with the Turtles. Such little plantings were invariably tended by humans in their spare time. The only use Turtles seemed to have for growing vegetation was to eat it, but that they did only rarely. The Turtles didn't need to do much farming for food, because the Turtles ate almost anything, organic or not.
As the last car went by, Sork saw a Turtle waiting on the far side, demonstrating impatience by munching at something —it sounded like rock being crushed. Sork recognized the alien from the rusty carapace and yellow eyes—and mostly from the creature's stunted size. It was the one he worked for.
"Hello, Facilitator," Sork said. That was of course the creature's title, not his name—certainly not his unpronounceable Turtle name. Among themselves the humans had given their own names to the aliens—"Litlun" for this one, because he was smaller than the rest.
The Turtle engaged his transposer and spoke. "Which Quintero are you?" he demanded.
"I'm Sork Quintero," he said. "Your records keeper." He tried to move away to avoid Litlun's tart, musky smell. It had an acid hint of lemon rind and a sharp turpentine tang: it was the smell of Turtles.
The Turtle made a sound of annoyance. He turned without a word and stalked away, his carapace rusty brown in the sunlight. Sork knew that the Turtle was confused by the fact that Sork was an identical twin. It irritated him, and seemed to make him dislike both of them. But that was all right with Sork Quintero, because he didn't like Litlun either.
Oddly, the other Turtles didn't seem to, either. But who could understand what Turtles felt?
Sork stopped at the door of the office of the woman he loved, frowning. An unfamiliar male voice was coming from within. When Sork peered inside he saw a stranger hovering over Sue-ling's desk. The man had a neatly pointed, curly brown beard on a pink, undepilated face. He looked young, but there was a weary sadness in his brown eyes as he waited for Sue-ling to check something out in her records.
Sue-ling gave Sork a quick smile as he entered and the stranger turned to greet him, hand outstretched. "Hello," he said. "I'm Francis Krake."
"Sork Quintero," Sork said, shaking the hand. It was a strong, hard hand, and the man seemed decent enough. But strangers were unusual in the Turtle compound. "What are you doing here?" Sork asked blundy.
"I'm asking the doctor here for a favor," the man said. "It's about my crew. We had a little accident, and they're in the surgery topside—up in the orbital station. So while I'm waiting for them to be ready to fly again I thought I'd take a few days to look Earth over, and I've been asking the doctor to keep checking on them for me."
"A few days isn't much time to see a whole planet," Sork pointed out.
Krake nodded doubtfully, as though unsure he were getting the point. "Actually I've seen Earth before," he said. "It's just that it has been a long time."