Footfall (41 page)

“The fithp complain that their warriors have not been well treated, and that many were killed as they attempted to surrender. The fithp regard this as barbaric.” Dawson’s voice registered bitter amusement.

“The surrender gesture is easily seen. They lie on their backs, rendering themselves helpless. This gesture is deeply embedded into their psychology. One might say it is deep within their very souls. They do not surrender lightly, and when they do, the submission is total. You may believe this. It is true.

“Their leader or Admiral-the word translates to herdmaster as closely as anything else-has asked me to speak to you in order to save slaughter. He says that he can deliver many asteroids, and drop them precisely where he wishes. They do not need to go to the asteroid belt. They can use lunar rocks. Their command of space is complete and they have begun construction of a lunar base.

“When they first approached Earth we all wondered what they wanted. We know now. They intend to live on the Earth. They intend that all humans submit. They have come to stay. They mean to be the dominant but not the only intelligent species on Earth. They have assured me-and I believe them-that they will take the surrender of all humans, and they will incorporate them into their herd.

“Those of their race who surrender become the property of the herd. Eventually they or their descendants may find status therein. For biological reasons humans will never be able to integrate as fithp have traditionally done, but our descendants will be their partners. The human herd will be allowed to live under man-made rules. They will study us to know what those rules shall be.

“We will be allowed to choose our own rules so long as they do not conflict with fithp dominance, but they insist that we must live by the rules we choose. They do not tolerate rogues. We will achieve mankind’s oldest dream, to be one people, with one philosophy, one set of rules for all of us. They do nothing alone. A individual’s acts are taken to be the responsibility of his grout In particular, the fithp mating practices are entirely instinctual going by mating seasons, and they mate for life.”

Good-bye to individualism. Reynolds shuddered. A moment later, Hello, monogamy. Interesting.

Dawson went on. “They intend to do what they must to rule the Earth. They regret the great loss of life from the Foot, but this will not stop them from sending another, and another, until humans understand the great power of the fithp.

“Until you do understand, they have no wish to kill noncombatants. There is a symbol—”

Dawson was describing a fithp on its back, Oh? We use a red cross—

“—urge you not to misuse the symbol. They will be watching. Using the ‘harmless’ symbol for military equipment or installation will result in bombardment of all the places so marked. They se more than you believe they can see. Their radars and lasers are efficient and powerful

They would be.

“Do understand,” Dawson’s recorded voice said. “The Chtap tisk Fithp mean what they say. They have crossed light-years a space to come here. They will not go home. They will be here for centauries.

“They are a collective people who live by strict rules in herds Evolution has eliminated all the rogues from the fithp. They will give humans good treatment by their standards. They would prefer to take the Earth in good condition, but take it they must. Their large spacecraft is their world until they do.”

“Very good,” Wade Curtis said. His voice was loud in the quiet.

Fuck him, he’s staring at the walls. “Centauries. Alpha Centauries.”

Joe Ransom said, “They let him get away with a lot. You caught that, at the end? There’s no backup. What they’ve got, we’ve seen. And they can’t go home, I was right there—”

“-Uses his tone of voice like a fine working tool. ‘By their standards.” Sherry mused, “I wonder if they’ll want us to follow their mating seasons? And of course the fithp won’t catch any of that.”

The President and the Navy men watched in evident surprise. The Dreamer Fithp were all over that speech like dogs on a stag.

“Monogamy, anyway, Sherry. He made quite a point of it. I wonder if they saw some X-rated movie.”

“Whatever,” Curtis said. “Dawson is one smart son of a bitch. Can we hear that again?”

The air-duct pipes narrowed. Alice felt trapped, and for a moment she thought of turning back. Then she set her jaw, hard, and went on.

She rounded a turn. He was there.

Wes Dawson was curled into a small ball. Fetal position. The really sick ones do that. In the movies they always go violent. The therapists would love it if they could get that much action on the closed wards.

Dawson didn’t move as she came closer to him.

He didn’t answer.

“Wes, it’s Alice—”

“I ate shit for the sake of that Don’t-Bomb-Me symbol.”

She said nothing. Didn’t I used to do that? Try to blow the therapist’s mind by using dirty words? And Mrs. Fitzpatrick caught me at it.

“Well, I’m going to be famous.”

“You were wonderful! You told them all about the horrors— God, the way you used your voice! And the snouts didn’t even suspect—”

He started to uncoil. Alice moved away slightly.

“But you already know what I was trying to do,” Wes said. Half uncoiled, he still wouldn’t look at her. “They won’t. Wes Dawson. Now they can forget Quisling.”

“We all agreed,” Alice said. “We all thought you should do it.”

“Yeah. Just like fithp. Everybody does everything together. Look, it’s all right, Alice, I’ll be all right.” He faced her at last “Thanks for finding me. I’ll be okay.” He smiled, and damn, I looked real, but she’d seen so many phony smiles. “See? I’m fine.”

Maybe he is. He didn’t look helpless now. Alice took a deep breath. I am not a freemartin! She moved closer to Dawson.

Abruptly he launched himself at her. She couldn’t move fast enough to get away, and he wrapped his arms around her and drove her against him. She felt panic. If I fight him now, he’ll never get over this. She felt him draw her closer still. She felt smothered and wanted to flee. She tucked her head down, nose below his armpit, to breathe. She didn’t struggle.

He curled against her and was still, except for his jerky breathing. He held her, but he wasn’t moving. Slowly she relaxed the tension in her muscles as she’d been taught, beginning with her toes, ankles, then calves…

His tears soaked through her hair and wet her scalp. Almost without volition her arms went around him, and she held him, “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“I needed a hug. My God, I needed to be hugged. Alice. thanks.”

“It’s all right.”

Nat was measuring ingredients into a blender. He moved briskly. Lime juice, sugar, rum, scoop out half a Crenshaw melon, add ice. Low setting. The blades tended to break on the ice at higher settings. In defense against the godawful noise he moved up alongside Harpanet’s head and raised his voice.

“You’re used to long wars.”

“There are records from the homeworld. The Shape Wars lasted five generations. There were others.” Harpanet paused for thought, then: “I cannot comment from the loser’s point of view. I never wondered until you taught me. For the winning fithp, wars are long. Losers cease to be a fithp. The Traveler Fithp did not taste war until now.”

“Was the taste to your liking?” Nat hit the button that ended the howl of the blender.

Digits swiped at thin air: How can I know? “I fell from the sky, I lost my fithp, I tried to surrender. No human knew how to take my surrender. You have warriors from Kansas, isn’t it? Ask them.”

“They’re not sane.” Curtis joined the group. “Left alone too long, maybe.”

Harpanet let his digits and lower eyelids droop in the gesture they’d learned to interpret as sadness.

Ransom held his glass out for Reynolds to fill. “I sure feel sorry for Dawson.”

Curtis nodded. “Yeah. Poor bastard risks his arse to give u some information, and a lot of nerds think he’s turned traitor What worries me are the ones who think he meant it and want to take his advice.”

“Maybe we should,” Sherry said. “But it wouldn’t work. There are too many like you and Ransom.”

“You ought to be glad of that.”

“Hey.” Reynolds moved between them. “Have a drink.” Hi poured. “Sherry, you don’t want to surrender.”

“No, but I don’t want to fight, either!”

“Wasn’t you we asked to fight,” Curtis said.

“Enough,” Ransom said. “The question is, what will the President do? He sure didn’t take it very well. Maybe he’d want to quit.”

“Nah,” Curtis said. “He’s not my favorite choice, but he’s go more guts than that.”

“Sure?”

“He damned well better have.”

Harpanet spoke insistently. “What are you leading me to?”

“Eh?”

“You speak of challenging your herdmaster.”

Sherry laid her hand across Harpatiet’s brow. “It’s not what it sounds like,” she said.

“But they said—”

“We are the Dreamer Fithp,” Reynolds said. “We say anything. But we’re not going to challenge the President. Wade wasn’t ever thinking that way.” He put an edge to his voice. “Were you, Wade?”

“No, of course not.” Curtis grinned wolfishly. “Besides, it wouldn’t work.”

Nat filled a sizable mug with what remained in the blender: about half. “Swim?”

“Ssshure.”

“Yeah,” Ransom said. “Only I want a real drink, not that slop. Wade? Sherry?”

“Thank you, yes,” Curtis said. After a moment Sherry Atkinson nodded and followed them out.

Reynolds and Harpanet walked into the mudroom, and into the mud-filled pool, without interrupting their conversation. It faltered when they noticed the near stranger. The President of the United States floated in the warm mud with his eyes closed.

Harpanet dipped his nostril. Nat said, “Not in the face. He looks too tired to play.”

“I heard that,” the President said. “I am.”

Harpanet shimmied. The wall of his flank sent warm, muddy water sloshing gently across President Coffey. The President smiled. “Heating just one end of the pool,” he asked, “who thought that up?”

“Human fithp need it too warm. Too much surface for volume. Shed heat too fast.”

Nat said, “The guy who thought of that was the curator of the San Diego Zoo, George Pournelle. He had some very rare rhinos, and he didn’t know what kind of temperature they liked. So he put a temperature gradient across the cage and let them make their own decisions.”

The President nodded. He was in the hottest part of the pool. He looked very relaxed. He opened one eye and fixed it on Harpanet. “You’ve hit us hard.”

Harpanet asked, “Was it the Foot?”

“It was. You’ve killed a great many people.”

“Not I. I am of the Dreamer Fithp now. Can I help?” It was a rebuke.

The President stirred. “Reynolds, have you seen the tapes?”

“Yeah. This is a melon daiquiri. Have some. I don’t have any mouth diseases.”

“Neither do I, and thanks for not asking. Jesus, you make them big. Were you going to drink all of this?”

“Yeah. I told you, I’ve seen the tapes.”

The President drank. He said, “Nice. Are we going to live through this?”

“The species is. Hell, they can’t conquer us. Some of us will live. We could get down to ‘The Men in the Walls’—”

“’What’s that?”

“William Tenn. Humans living like parasites in the aliens’ environment, and we still win, because we’re small enough to hide in places they can’t get to. But it won’t come to that. This is our planet, and we own every corner. Siberia, the Sahara, Greenland, they can’t come after us there.”

“They don’t have to,” David Coffey said. “They just keep pounding away, killing more and more people, until we can’t stand it any longer. If we have to give up anyway, why prolong it? Let the survivor types go to Siberia. The rest surrender.”

“It is sensible,” Harpanet said.—

“No.” Reynolds wanted his drink, but he was too polite to reach for it. “In the first place, it wouldn’t work. Too many would stay behind. Pretend to surrender, but they’d hide weapons and kill snouts whenever they got a chance. You can’t surrender for everybody—”

“I agree.”

“Well, the fithp think you can. They’ll hold us all responsible. What the fithp call surrender, we don’t know how to do that.”

Coffey said, “But we have to do something.”

“Maybe the fithp lasers only come in a couple of frequencies. We can make reflective paint for those frequencies. Paint them on the bombers.”

“That’ll take a while, won’t it?”

“Sure. Set up a research station.”

Harpanet said, “The lasers can be-changed. The color can be made different.”

Reynolds shrugged. “So maybe that doesn’t work.”

The President let himself sag into the mud. He still had Reynolds’ mug of melon daquiri. “What else should we be doing?”

“Study our friend Harpanet. Find out how to keep him happy.”

“I’m for that,” Harpanet said.

“Why isn’t anyone studying me?” the President asked plaintively.

“Harpanet’s bound to need things. Maybe it’s dietary supplements, things that don’t get into our foods. Settlers in Brazil had a terrible time with vitamin deficiencies. The soil is peculiar. Well, there’s bound to be something missing from African soil. Not for us, we evolved there, but the Traveler Fithp didn’t! What’s missing? How can we stop the fithp from getting to it? Maybe they can’t sleep in total darkness. Keep knocking out their power sources and in a few days they’ll fall over—”

“No,” said Harpanet.

“Okay, no, but you see what I’m getting at. We tried playing baseball with Harpanet. There’s no way to put a glove on him, of course, so we tried tossing a softball around, maybe he could catch it bare-handed. He can’t. He can’t throw it either.”

“This skill was not prized among the Traveler Fithp,” Harpanet said placidly.

“We could probably rig up a glove for him,” Nat said earnestly. “It would look like an umbrella, but he could catch. He still couldn’t throw. He’s hopeless with a football. I thought he would be, but it’s-we’ve got films, and we’ve been showing them to your soldiers, and it gets them rolling around on the floor. Harpanet spreads his trunk like a great fan, and the ball either goes through it or ricochets away. We want to try basketball or volleyball. We think the ball is big enough that he won’t lose it—”

The President was laughing so hard that it looked like he was going to lose the mug, so Nat took it. “This is research?”

“Mr. President, the delicate point I’m trying to pound home is that Harpanet is at his limit. He—”

“Mug.”

Nat drank, then handed across the mug. “He’s at his limit, that’s all. He gets just so good and no better. We still play, of course. We all need exercise, him most of all.

“Sherry’s sure we’re anthropomorphizing. Maybe the fithp have games we’d be awful at. But I think she’s assuming symmetry where there just isn’t any need for it.

“The fithp have bad hands. They’re just bloody clumsy, and no wonder, with no bones in their grasping digits! I think they’re a young race. God knows humanity never finished evolving in any direction, but I think the fithp are even younger than that. They’re too young to have space travel. They didn’t even discover it for themselves! What got them here was those great granite messages left by an extinct species. They shouldn’t be here at all.”

“They’re doing well, considering their handicaps.”

“We need to know their handicaps. Set up a research station. You have other prisoners now. Study them. They’ve got a mating season-Dawson said so too, and emphasized it-and their mating practice is more reflexive than ours. Can we duplicate their pheromones and drive them nuts?”

The President was still laughing. “Somebody told me once that I’m not fit to mold the future because I’m only allowed to think up to the next election. Who is it that plans for the future of the human race?”

“Speaking.” Nat took the mug, drank deeply, passed it back.

“Then why am I in charge?”

“Somebody told you it was your turn in the barrel, and made you believe it.”

Coffey laughed. “That’s one way to look at it. My God, when I think of what I had to do to get this job! Mr.—”

“Reynolds. Nat Reynolds.”

“Nat, I ought to come down here more often, only I don’t suppose I can.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Clybourne. I’ve sent him off on an errand, but he’ll be back.”

“So you ignore him,” Reynolds said.

“I can’t do that. He’s doing his job, the best he can-and maybe one day I really will need him.”

You might at that, Reynolds thought. “If you’re done warming that mug—”

Things got a little hazy thereafter. Nat remembered making another batch of daquiris. Harpanet cut the melon, but he was fairly clumsy at it. He did none of the drinking. The fithp didn’t use alcohol.

“There’s plenty we can do. Elephant guns. We should be producing them as fast as we can. Who makes elephant guns?”

“There are people I can ask,” said the President. “The British? They made a big double-barreled rifle, a ‘Nitro Express’—”

“Round up all you can find,” Reynolds said. “Send ’em to Africa. Somebody there can use them.” He laughed. “It worries me to excess, there may be a young Zulu warrior somewhere who doesn’t have an elephant gun.”

“Are your stories that bloody too? Ah, I’ve got something. Harpanet, are you willing to speak to your ship?”

“I am. They will take it that I am speaking for your fithp.”

“I know, but you can at least tell them that you were allowed to surrender. They may be afraid to try by now.”

“Good,” said Nat. “Now, Dawson’s sign of the friendly fithp the ‘Don’t Bomb Me’—”

“Yeah,” said the President. “Is it possible they want that sign so they’ll know where our food sources are? So they can bomb them?”

Harpanet reared; displaced mud made a godawful sucking sound. “They would not. Bomb the local-surrender sign? They would not!”

“All right,” Coffey said mildly.

“By the same token, we use it only where appropriate.” Reynolds thought, If it isn’t on the Bellingham greenhouse, they’ll notice. If the sign is too big, they’ll notice. I can’t say any of that where Harpanet can hear. At that moment the President winked at him.

Reynolds looked at the foaming glass and shuddered. “What’s that?”

“One of the last Alka-Seltzer in existence, you ungrateful bastard,” Joe Ransom said. “And Wade found you a vitamin B!. Here.”

“Bless you.” Reynolds washed the tablet down. “I think it was worth it. Even at worst, he needed to get drunk. Did I save civilization? I can’t quite remember.”

“Yeah. We watched you from the TV in the lounge. You got him thinking about the long run. We think you put some iron in his spine.”

“I hope so.” Nat moved gingerly down the hall toward his room. Then he stopped. “It shook up Harpanet a bit. He told me he’d never had a conversation with his herdmaster. Much less an argument.”

“He’ll get over it. Now he thinks you’re more important than he thought.” Ransom glanced at his watch. “My turn, I guess. You know something? I hate mud. Why couldn’t they like swimming in something sensible, like lime Jell-O?”