Departures

NASTY, BRUTISH, AND…

Sooner or later just about everybody tries his hand at writing a bar story. This one’s mine. It may also be of interest because it introduces the Foitani, who play such a prominent role in Earthgrip (Del Rey: New York, 1991). They aren’t an entirely pleasant people, but given their history, they could hardly be expected to be.

Only humans, and not many of them, know why my favorite bar is called Hobbes’. That doesn’t mean humans are the only people who go in, though, not by a long shot. Humans are spread thin out here, a couple of thousand light-years from home. The night I’m thinking of, I was the only one in the place.

“What’ll it be, Walt?” Raoul L’evesque’s number-two bartender asked me when I came in. (No, Hobbes’ isn’t named for the owner, obviously.)

“Something nasty, brutish, and short,” I told him. (That’s why it’s called Hobbes’, and knowing it’s worth a free drink.)

“Tequila and mor-fruit?” Joe suggested. He knows me. He reached for the tequila with one hand, the mor-fruit (it’s called that, I suppose, because it’s mor or less like lime) with another, and the saltshaker with another. That left one free to wave at somebody who’d come in behind me. (I told you I was the only human in the place.)

While I was licking the salt off the web of my thumb, I looked around to see who-or what-was in Hobbes’ this time. There were three or four tables full of Joe’s people: not surprising, since Rapti, the planet under this space station, was Joe’s home-world. It was early yet, but a couple of them looked about ready to slide under their tables. (That’s what they get for being four-fisted drinkers.)

An Atheter was already swinging from the chandelier. She was good at it. Atheters live in trees when they’re at home, and they have prehensile tails. This one waved an empty glass at Joe and screeched for a refill.

A couple of Egnants put their credit cards in the music machine, one after the other. Raucous noise started blaring, loud enough to drown out even the Atheter.

I walked over to the machine, saw how much they’d paid, and used my own plastic to outbid them for quiet. They let their lips skin back from their teeth, but cheered up again when I bought them drinks. Egnants aren’t hard to deal with unless you try to talk about religion.

I sneezed when I sat back down at the bar. Joe’s ears twitched in surprise. “What kind of noise is that?” he asked.

“I’ve got the edge of a cold-a small sickness humans get,” I said, disgusted at the way the worlds worked. They keep saying they’ll have a cure for colds Real Soon Now. I’ll believe it when I see it; they’ve been saying that since before humans got off Terra. Greenbelly fever is dead as smallpox now, because it killed people and they threw research money at it till it went away. Colds are just nuisances. It’s hard to get excited enough about a nuisance to get rid of it.

I ordered a beer to chase the tequila, took a sip, looked around some more. What would have been the second sip stopped halfway to my mouth. Off in a corner by him/her/itself sat a person whose species I didn’t recognize, and I’ve seen a lot of them.

“Where’s that one from?” I asked Joe. (Bartenders know everything. It’s part of their job. If you don’t believe me, just ask one.)

“Who?”

“The big blue one back there over my right shoulder.” I didn’t point at the person. You never can tell what gesture will offend somebody.

“Oh, him? He’s a Foitan.”

“No kidding!” Now I really had to work to keep from staring. “I thought they were extinct.”

A lot of worlds in this part of space, Rapti among them, had Foitani artifacts; they were on the edges of what had been a really big Foitani empire maybe thirty, fifty thousand years ago. Then the really big empire fought a really big civil war. There are a lot of dead worlds in this part of space, too, and the Foitani killed most of them.

“So did we, until maybe fifty years ago,” Joe said. “Then they started showing up every so often, traders mostly, but archaeologists, too. They only have a few planets now, and they’re interested in their glory days.”

I shivered a little. “Where’s their homeworld? Do you know?”

“About as far from here toward galactic center as yours is away from it.”

I shivered again, not a little this time. If the Foitani Empire had reached across thousands of light-years, how big had that war been? How many more dead worlds lay inside that sphere? More than I wanted to think about, I was certain. Not even humans were stupid on that scale.

I found myself walking back toward the Foitan. Tequila always makes me reckless. “Excuse me,” I said. “May I buy you another of whatever you are drinking?”

The Foitan had a bug by its ear. It looked like a Rapti bug, which meant it ought to handle Spanglish. It did. The Foitan said something in a language I didn’t recognize, but my own bug did. I heard, “Thank you, if I may do the same for you.”

I waved to Joe, pointed at my beer and the bottle in front of the Foitan, held up a finger. Joe waved back; he’d seen me. “May I join you?” I asked the Foitan, nodding toward a chair across from him.

By the way of answer, he pushed the chair out with his foot so I could sit. My legs wouldn’t have been long enough for that, but then, what I could see of the Foitan was a lot bigger than I was. He looked more or less humanoid, but only the biggest battleball players would have seemed like anything but children next to him. His face reminded me of what people might have looked like if they’d come from bears-blue bears-instead of apes: nasty, brutish, and tall, you might say. Actually, that’s not fair. He was pretty impressive.

“My name is Naplak Naplak Kap,” he said.”I have not seen your kind before. Is it polite to ask what you are called?”

“I’m Walter Harbron,” I answered. “Walt will do.”

“Walt,” Naplak Naplak Kap said gravely. Just then Joe came over with our drinks. I took a pull at my beer; the Foitan half-emptied his new bottle. “Walt,” he said again. He studied me. His eyes were large. They didn’t seem to blink. “May I ask about your species? I do so only from curiosity and mean no offense.”

“Yes, go ahead. May I ask about yours as well? I’ve never met any Foitani before; I’d like to learn more about you.”

Naplak Naplak Kap’s shrug was massive. “I came to this world to learn more myself. I am by profession a recoverer of the past, and we Foitani have much past to recover. What does your race call itself, and why are you here?”

“We’re humans. As for me-” I shrugged. “I travel from star to star. I buy things, I sell things: sometimes material things, sometimes information. I haven’t starved yet.”

“Ah. Profit.” The bug’s flat translation didn’t give me any feel for how Naplak Naplak Kap felt about profit. Then he rumbled, “Humans. Yes, I’ve heard of you people. You’re widespread these days, aren’t you?”

“We’ve done well for ourselves.” I shrugged again. I didn’t want to tell him that humans ranged as widely now as his folks had at their peak. Sure, we’re just one species among many, but I still didn’t want him to take it the wrong way. He was too big to risk riling.

“Humans,” he repeated, this time, I thought, more to himself than to me. Suddenly he seemed to remember I was there. “Excuse me. I seem to recall something about your species in a data base from our ancient days that the Raptics showed me. My computer did a better job of reading it than the locals could. May I check?”

“Go ahead,” I told him. (What was I going to say?)

His computer looked like a computer-not like what we build, but it couldn’t have been anything else. He talked with it in a language my bug couldn’t handle. I suppose it was his own. He finished his bottle, almost absentmindedly.”Yes, here we are,” he said at last.

He spent long enough reading that, had he been a human, he would have been a rude one. Every so often he’d grunt. I didn’t know whether he was surprised or angry or curious or what. Finally I got bored waiting. I said, ”May I ask what your records show?”

Once more, it was as if he had to remind himself I was sitting with him. “Oh, yes, of course. I apologize.” He put the computer back out of sight; by the way he fumbled about, my guess was that he wore it in a belt pouch. Then his eyes found mine again. “According to this data base, your species should not exist.”

“We’ve tried to do that to ourselves a few times,” I said, laughing. “Hasn’t worked yet.” I drank some more beer. It was good. I could feel the chair pressing against my behind. “I’m real enough. We’re all real.”

“But you should not be,” Naplak Naplak Kap said. He didn’t have much in the way of a sense of humor. Whether that goes for Foitani in general I couldn’t tell you. “Let me explain.”

“Go ahead.” I nodded. (One more time: what was I going to say?)

“You know we once ruled in this part of space, yes?” (I nodded again.) “We explored farther yet, and once we touched on what I think must be your world.” He dug out the computer again, did some quick figuring. “In the coordinates the Raptics use, the location of the planet’s star was-”

I pulled my own computer out of my pocket, turned Raptic numbers into my kind… and felt my jaw drop. Those numbers worked out to just over a light-year from Sol. I rubbed my nose, which was starting to get numb. I said, “I guess that has to be my star, but the location’s not quite right.”

“You forget,” Naplak Naplak Kap said, “these records are 28,000 of my years old.”

I felt like an idiot (not for the first time). Stars didn’t move fast, not compared to light, but they did move, and in umpty-ump thousand years Sol had gone a good ways. “Yes, I did forget,” I said numbly. “Tell me about my savage ancestors.”

“They were,” Naplak Naplak Kap said. “They were vicious, too, and clever. One tribe managed to kill a Foitan despite his armor and weaponry, and was in the process of roasting him when my people took vengeance-from the air, at long range. We had learned.”

“And so?” I asked. (What I wanted to do was cheer for those poor doomed cavemen.)

“And so we decided that even savage humans were dangerous, and that they should not be allowed to live to develop technology: we decided to destroy them.” The bug in my ear put no expression into the words, which made them doubly chilling. Naplak Naplak Kap went on, “My species, it appears, did this often enough to have developed a protocol for it. We knew what we were about, I assure you.”

“Go on,” I ground out. Humans weren’t innocent of such things, not while we were still on Terra and, sadly, not always after we got off, either. But having someone calmly talk about strangling us in our cradle-

“We prepared a respiratory virus genetically tailored to ensure that your species would not become immune to it, then disseminated it widely throughout your planet’s atmosphere. In a few generations, you should have disappeared, and your world would have been there for the taking. But our own Suicide Wars started soon after, so we never went back.”

“And we never died out.” I felt like crowing.

“So you didn’t.” Guessing aliens’ expressions is a fool’s game, but Naplak Naplak Kap’s seemed to say he thought it was my fault. “So far as I know, yours is the only species of which that is true.”

In the middle of my triumphant chuckle, I sneezed three times in a row.

“My bug does not translate that noise,” Naplak Naplak Kap said.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a cold…”

I looked at Naplak Naplak Kap. He looked at me. Then I waved to Joe and bought him another drink. (What was I supposed to do?)