Greenberg, Martin H - The Diplomacy Guild vol. 1, page 5
"Wrong!" Karpov cried. "Such a great opportunity to learn! We must not turn our backs' Not only the mystery of this moon, but the mystery of Locrians, the mystery of Crotonites! Go among them, is what we must do! Engage them! Entangle ourselves! How else can we learn? How can we simply turn our backs at such a time?" 11 "Easily," said Eslane Ree. "We're scientists, not spies.
"And to involve ourselves in any such irregular transspecies dealings is completely unwise," said Ayana Sanoclaro.
"And for all we know the bugs are the bad guys and the bats are the good guys," said Septen Bolangyr. We'll be
putting our noses into something we don't remotely understand. That doesn't feel very healthy to me."
"But can't you see-- "
"Won't you realize-"
"If you'd only stop to consider-"
And so on until Wing-Marra, running out of patience at last, cut through the uproar to say, "I make it three in favor, three against. All right. I cast the tie-breaking vote. We go in with the Locrians. "
"No!" The word came from Eslane Ree and Ayana Sanoclaro in the same instant. "Impossible! Unthinkable!"
"And very stupid," said Bolangyr.
"Those who don't like it," Wing-Marra replied, "can place formal objections on file. We will take official notice and proceed as planned." To Eslane Ree he said, "This is a scientific mission, yes. But it's also an Erthuma spacesh!p, and all Erthuma ships have the responsibility of protecting Erthuma interests in space, which sometimes involves monitoring the activities of the other five stargoing species. That's what we're supposed to do, and that's what we're going to do. Clear? Good. Murry-Balff, I want to talk to you about what instruments we're going to use to scan the Crotonite lunar base. Sanoclaro, put together a Crotonite master psychological profile for me. I need to know what makes those bats tick.
You have twenty minutes. Eslane Ree, park us around that second planet's moon and compute a landing orbit that'll put our groundship down somewhere in the neighborhood of the Crotonite base. Bolangyr, run the usual maintenance checks on all extravehicular-activity equipment. I think that's all for now. " He paused a moment. "No. There's one thing more. Hyath, go down below and tell the snake xcuse me, the Naxians-what we've just decided. Ask one of them to volunteer for the landing party.
"And me?" Mikoil Karpov asked.
Wing-Marra realized that he had provided an assignment for everyone except Biochemistry. But he couldn't see any immediate role for Karpov in any of this.
Then, with a pang, the captain remembered that they had all come to this obscure comer of the galaxy for a
reason that had nothing to do with Locrians or Crotonites or galactic power politics. For a long sad moment he stared at the glowing screen of the spectrometer. Neglected though it was, it was still flashing bright-hued reports from the nearby molecular cloud. Tbrough Wing-Marra's mind went roiling visions of esoteric hydrocarbons, life-giving amino acids, complex polyvalents of a thousand kinds, stirring about tantalizingly in that mysterious ocean of intricate gases that lay just beyond his reach.
He sighed.
"You keep an eye on the spectrometer screen," he told Karpov. "Ibere's no telling what sort of significant stuff is going to turn up inside that cloud. And we aren't going to stop the whole mission dead in its tracks while we deal with this distraction. Not if I can help it. Okay? Okay. Adjourned.
They set up their camp in the long shadow of the great mountains, fifty kilometers from the Crotonite moon base: close enough so that the curvature of the lunar surface would not interfere with Murry-Balff's instruments, but not so close that the Crotonites would come running right over to put up a fuss.
The first thing Wing-Marra did was to send out an all-frequencies neutrino-wave announcement telling the entire galaxy that a joint Erthuma-Naxian-Locrian expedition had landed to investigate certain "anomalies" on a moon of the second planet of an unclaimed main-sequence star in the W49 nebula, where a Crotonite exploration team appeared to be already at work.
Murry-Balff said quizzically, "Sir, is that such a- good idea? The Crotonites can't fail to pick that message up. Should we really be letting them know we're here?"
"They already know we're here," Wing-Marra said, .amused. "Do you think we can put a groundship down right in their backyard without their noticing? What the message does is tell everyone else that we're here. In case the Crotonites have any idea of defending their turf against intruders. If we were to attempt a secret landing, they
might feel it was safe to respond with an immediate lethal attack. "
"Against a transspecies ship? But that would be an act of war!" Murry-Balff exclaimed.
"Yes, it would. That's why I want to make it difficult for them to proceed with it. Most of us operate under the sane and reasonable assumption that one species will never attack another, but I suspect the Crotonites may operate under the assumption that they shouldn't attack another species unless they think they can get away with it. If everybody for fifty thousand light-years around knows we've landed here, the Crotonites are less likely to undertake military action against us. Or so I hope."
In fact he had no real idea how the Crotonites were likely to react to anything, but he was prepared for the worst. The psychological profile of them that Ayana Sanoclaro had drawn up for him was profoundly disturbing in that regard.
Of the five senior races of the galaxy, the Crotonites were the least predictable and, potentially at least, the most dangerous. Only their preference for. worlds with thick atmospheres heavily laced with ammonia and hydrogen cyanide, evidently, is what had kept them out of serious conflict with the other races. The worlds they inhabited were unendurable to the other species; the worlds they coveted were worlds that none of the others would want.
What set them apart from the other intelligent species of the galaxy, possibly even more than their metabolic differences, was the fact that they were the only one that had wings. Locrians and Erthumoi walked upright; Naxians were wrigglers; Cephallonians, aquatic; the ponderous Samians, when they deigned to move at all, rolled. But Crotonites were fliers.
On their home worlds they lived primarily airborne lives, moving slowly but with a strange grace through the heavy atmosphere, swooping and rising, rising and swooping. Lesser winged creatures were their food, caught always while in flight. They had no cities, only small transient settlements fashioned of twisted fiber, which they abandoned after only short periods of occupation. How they had ever attained the technological capacity to achieve interstellar travel was hard for Erthumoi to understand; but, then, it was hard for Erthumoi to see how any of the Five Races, except perhaps the Locrians, had managed to cross that difficult-to-attain threshold. Yet they all had, where thousands of other intelligent species had not. Some force had driven them, often against all biological and mechanical probability, to reach outward not only to their neighboring worlds but to the stars themselves.
Could it be, Wing-Marra wondered, that the force that had impelled the Crotonites outward was hate?
Certainly they manifested plenty of that in their dealings with the other races. They scarcely troubled to conceal their contempt for beings who had no wings. "Groundcrawlers," they called them or "mud-lickers" or "land-slugs. " So great was their disdain for all things wingless that they could not bear even to eat the meat of the unwinged, predatory carnivores though they were: It was shameful, they explained, to incorporate the flesh of landslugs into their own high-soaring bodies.
Once they had learned that various sorts of wingless mud-lickers had found a way of traveling between the stars, therefore, the Crotonites must have felt that they too would have to go forth into that vast darkness. And they had not rested until they also had solved the mysteries of hyperspace travel.
Once they did enter the community of starfaring races, they accepted the presence of those who already roamed the galaxy, because they had no choice about it. There was no way for them to maintain absolute isolation from the rest. Interstellar commerce requires a certain amount of contact with alien creatures, and it is economically suicidal to let racial prejudices get in the way of that. But they made it plain that they did no more than tolerate any of the others, and that in fact what they felt for them was loathing and enmity.
They did not, of course, carry those feelings to the extent of actual warfare. If there ever had been any such
thing as interstellar warfare, it had gone out of fashion long before the first Erthurna starfarers had come upon the scene. One reason for that was the logistical difficulty of waging war on a galactic scale, even with hyperdriveequipped vessels. Another was that in a galaxy of effectively infinite size there was very little motive for serious territorial disputes among six intelligent life-forms whose environmental requirements were all mutually incompatible. But the main reason, probably, why the Crotonites never acted upon their hostility toward the wingless was that they knew the wingless would not permit war to break out. Nothing was apt to draw the separate races together more swiftly than any sort of conflict that might lead to war. War was an expensive nuisance; war was a messy disruption; war simply could not be allowed. The Crotonites probably knew that they would be
annihilated at once by a united all-species force if they ever gave vent to
their deepest emotions, and that helped to keep the galactic peace.
Instead they cheated wherever they could, they swindled, they behaved
toward the wingless in all ways as though matters of morality were
unimportant. The wingless in turn bore little love for them. Erdiumoi, who had their own not very -complimentary nicknames for each of the other galactic races, called the Crotonites "bats," or sometimes even "devils." And now Wing-Marra found himself camped fifty kilometers from a nest of them.
"This moon can't have been airless very long," Linga Hyath was saying. "Probably it was just as habitable as its primary world, once upon a time." "You think so?" Wing-Marra said.
They stood, spacesuit-clad, arrayed in a semicircle around Murry-Balff as he bent over the bank of instruments that he had set up on the bed of the dry sea. There were eight in the group: Wing-Marra, Hyath, Sanoclaro, Murry-Balff, Eslane Ree, the Naxian Blue Sphere, and two of the Locrians. Septen Bolangyr, Mikoil Karpov, and Rosy Tetrahedron had remained behind on the Achilles.
Hyath indicated the towering mountain range that loomed behind them. "Those are very big mountains," she said. "The sort you'd expect to find on a moon like this. But look at the way they've been worn down. For most of their existence they've been subjected to wind and rain and the other geological forces of a living world. But of course an atmosphere will wander off into space if a world's not big enough to hold it by gravitational force and if it's warm enough so that the atmospheric molecules can move faster than the local escape velocity. There was a time when this place must have had an atmosphere pretty much like its primary's, I'd guess--these two are really a double-planet system, most Rely with similar outgassing history--but the moon, large though it is, was too small, and too warm, to keep its air. Little by little the entire atmosphere was able to break free of the gravitational field here and escape. And eventually there was none left at all. "
"How long ago did that happen, would you say?" Eslane Ree asked.
"Oh, quite recently, quite recently indeed," said Hyath "Within the last two or three hundred million years, is my top-of-the-head answer. "
Eslane Ree chuckled. "Oh. Only two or three hundred million years ago! That's your idea of quite recently?"
"Surely you understand that on the geological time scale that's only-"
"Hold it," Wing-Marra said. "I think Murry-Balff's got something."
The Communications had been leaning forward over his control panel, muttering to himself, shaking his head, tapping in data setups, wiping them out, tapping new ones in. Suddenly the board was alive with flashing lights.
"Okay,'-' Murry-Balff said. "I think we have data capture. I I Wing-Marra peered close. The readout was analog, but he could make nothing of the patterns he saw.
"What I've done," said Murry-Balff, "has been to plot light-wave deviation first. That's this information here. Assuming there's a zone of significant surface mass in that supposedly empty zone, it ought to have at least some
relativistic effects on photons traveling through its vicinity, regardless of the visual data corruption that the Crotonites are managing to throw up around it. Okay. There it is." He pointed to a pattern in green and red at the side of his panel. It meant nothing at all to Wing-Marra. Murry-Balff said, "It's next to imperceptible, but that's what you'd expect of any sort of mass smaller than a continent, anyway. But the fact is that it isn't imperceptible. What I'm picking up is the bending I expected, right here--and here-4hat's an inferred computation of the required size of whatever's causing the perturbation. Those are the boundaries of the concealed object, see?"
"Show me that again," Wing-Marra said.
Murry-Balff made a quick gesture with his light pen.
"But that's enormous!" said Wing-Marra. "It's the size of a small city!" "That's right. Not such a small one, either. The area is_imim~sixty-four square kilometers, plus or minus four. Now, we get the sonar in there and we try to see whether it'll penetrate the Crotonite data shield; and we discover that we can, more or less, although the perimeter data is likewise corrupt and has to be factored for a standard distortion deviation, which the little brain here in this box has been kind enough to work out for me. We bounce the sound waves through the invisibility shield, and luckily for us, the shield doesn't screen them out once we're inside and so far as I can tell does not corrupt our data, but returns us a clean readout. Which gives us the horizon profile of the concealed object."
"Where?"
"Here. You see? These ups, these downs. The skyline, so to speak, of the hidden city. And the mean elevation is-well, rooftop level, I make out to be eleven and one half meters, with a deviation of--umm-4he tallest building is, let's say, twenty-one and one half meters, but there aren't many of those, and most of the others are, well, single-story structures--" "Structures?" Ayana Sanoclaro said. "You've got actual buildings showing on that screen?"
The two Locrians were murmuring now in their own
harsh, clicking language. The Naxian, agitated, was rapidly thrusting its little flipper-limbs forth and retracting diem.
"Didn't you hear me?" Murry-Balff said. "There's a city under the Crotonite screen. Now that I'm past their corruption line, I'll have the whole thing mapped out for you in less than fifteen minutes. "
"A city?" Sanoclaro said in wonder. "The Crotonites have built a city on this airless moon? Under some sort of dome, do you mean?"
Murry-Balff looked up at her. "Did I say it was a Crotonite city? Do the Crotonites even build cities? There's no dome that I can see, at least not an actual physical one, though of course all I'm getting is shadow images, and it's possible that a dome viewed edge-on might somehow not show up on my screen. I can check that out from another angle. But you can see the building profiles, can't you?" He waved his hands grandly over the panel, which was still entirely incomprehensible to Wing-Marra. "There's nothing Crotonite-looking here. Look, these are streets and avenues. Crotonites don't ordinarily have streets and avenues, do they? And those are solid, rounded structures with vaulted roofs. I don't have the foggiest idea what they are, but Crotonite they aren't.'-
"But who-?" Sanoclaro demanded, gesturing bewdderedly. "It isn't one of ours, or we'd have had records of a landing here. It can't be Locrian. The Cephallonians would hardly build a settlement on a world that doesn't have a drop of water. The Samians--the Naxians-"
"Why does it have to be a city belonging to any of the Six Races?" Wing-Marra asked suddenly.
Everyone stared at him.
"What are you saying?" asked Eslane Ree. "That there's a seventh interstellar race somewhere that nobody knows about yet?"
"I don't know," Wing-Marra told her. "Right now all I can do is ask questions, not answer them." To Hyath he said, "You believe that this place once was as habitable as its companion planet, but that it's been airless like this for-how long? Three hundred million years?"
"Plus or minus a hundred million," said Hyath.
"Same difference." He closed his eyes a moment. Then, turning to the Locrians, he said, "You people were the first of the Six Races to achieve star travel, right? How long ago was that?"
"It was in the Eighteenth Era," one of the Locrians began.
"Translate that into Galactic Standard Years. Please."
After a moment the Locrian said, "You would think of it as approximately three hundred fifteen thousand years before the present time."
Wing-Marra nodded. By Linga Hyath's geological way of reckoning things, that was only a heartbeat ago.
He said, "And when you first got out into interstellar space, did you encounter any other starfaring races then, older races that are extinct now?"
"No," said the Locrian. "We did, of course, come upon the ruins of ancient civilizations which perhaps had been galactic in nature, though we do not believe that they were. But of living galactic races-no, no, we were the first of our epoch. And perhaps the first in the history of this galaxy." "I'm not so sure of that," said Wing-Marra, half to himselL His mind was racing. Knowledge he had not called upon in hundreds of years came bubbling now out of its deep hiding place.
In the second cycle of his life, flushed with the new youth of his first rejuvenation, he had turned his attention toward the remote past with much the same intensity as he had much later taken up organic chemistry. Archaeology then had been the center of his energies, and for decades he had pored backward into the yesterdays of his species, digging into the few hundred years of history that his native world of Hesperia could provide, then onward, deeper, to Earth, the mother world of all Erthumoi, where antiquity was measured in hundreds of centuries: Chich6n ItzA, Pompeii, Babylon, Troy, Luxor, Lascaux. But even that had not satisfied his hunger for antiquity, for Earth was a young world as galactic worlds went, and the Erthumoi
