“Tho,” she said, “when I am not here any longer, I hope you will remember what I’ve taught you.”
“Sure I will,” he said, and then did a double take. He scowled at her, half in anger, half in sudden alarm, and demanded, “What do you mean, when you’re not here?”
She waggled her jaw, like a shrug. “The freetherth have reported that my latht batch of eggth wath mothtly infertile. Tho I’ve retheived orderth to report for a termination examination,” she said.
Lysander was shocked. “MyThara!” he gasped. “They can’t do that!”
“Of courthe they can, Lythander,” she said firmly. “And I think I will fail it, my dear, and then, of courthe, it’th the titch’hik tankth for me.”
And of course they could, so when Lysander finally huddled with the rest of his cohort for sleep that night his drowsing thoughts were not of his return to Earth, or even of scantily clad human females. They were sad thoughts. MyThara had been a part of his life as long as he had had a life. He did not like to think of her being terminated.
Some of the fun was going out of the adventure.
Chapter 5
The great Hakh’hli ship is powered by three main drive engines. Each one of them is capable of shoving the ship through space at 1.4 G. For the sake of simple engineering prudence that seldom happens; ordinarily two are running, at fifty percent thrust, at all times, while the third is available for maintenance and, when rarely necessary, repairs. The great advantage of a strange-matter drive is that you need never run out of fuel. The problem is all the other way. Strange matter breeds. When ordinary matter is introduced into a lump of strange, the strange matter converts it into itself. This does not mean that if you drop a speck of strange matter onto the surface of the Earth it will turn the whole planet strange; it isn’t that easy. Strange matter repels the ordinary. To get past the force of that repulsion, the particles of ordinary matter must be fired into the strange matter with great energy; but that is what unavoidably happens in the Hakh’hli drive system. The result is that the longer the great ship flies, the more “fuel” it accumulates. The lumps at the heart of the Hakh’hli drive engines are each now six times as massive as when the motors first began to thrust. Because they are now so heavy there is that much more mass to accelerate and decelerate—which means more energy is needed—which means that the lumps are getting bigger faster. All the Hakh’hli need to feed it is ordinary matter, of which there is an infinity available in the universe; at every stop they tap asteroids, gas clouds, or the stellar winds for extra supplies—each particle of which adds one more particle to the mass of the ship. The Hakh’hli have known for centuries that they should soon divest themselves of some of that extra mass . . . but it is valuable mass. Like a miser clutching a bar of gold while he is drowning, they have clung to it. But they can’t cling to it much longer.
As the cohort gathered for shipwork the next morning they felt two momentary shifts in orientation, like small earth movements underfoot; it was the navigators making small course corrections as the ship decelerated toward its parking orbit around the planet Earth. It meant that the end of their journey was near. They all chattered excitedly about it, all but Sandy.
When their tutor ChinTekki-tho at last waddled toward them, he took one look at Sandy and asked, “What’s the matter with him?”
The cohort knew at once what the Senior meant, because all of them had noticed his gloomy mood. “It’s MyThara-tok,” Obie volunteered. “She has to take her physical.”
“Sandy doesn’t want her terminated,” Helen added. Polly finished spitefully, “He wants her to stay alive because he likes her better than any of us.”
ChinTekki-tho waggled his tongue in deprecation. “It is good to love one another,” he told Sandy, “but Thara-tok is getting old. She passed her eighteen-twelves of twelve-twelves of days long ago,”—it would have been the Earthly equivalent of fifty years or so—“and so she gets examined every twelve-twelves; that’s the rule, Lysander.”
“I know that,” Sandy said sulkily.
“She may well pass,” ChinTekki-tho pointed out. “I myself have passed five termination examinations. Many Hakh’hli pass as many as eight or nine of them; look at the Major Seniors.”
“Major Seniors always pass,” Tanya put in.
“They don’t always pass,” ChinTekki-tho corrected. “They usually pass, because, after all, they are Major Seniors; that’s all.”
“MyThara doesn’t think she will,” Sandy said. “I can tell.”
The teacher inclined his head. “Then that is that, isn’t it? It’s nothing to be sad about. It happens to us all, sooner or later; otherwise the ship would be too full and everyone would die. And if the old and weak do not go, how would we ever take more eggs out of the freezer to start new lives?”
“And then where would any of us be?” Polly demanded. “You just don’t think, Sandy.”
The tutor reproved her. “Of course he thinks. Lysander is a fully intelligent being, even if he isn’t Hakh’hli. He knows that MyThara-tok has many, many eggs in the freezer, and sooner or later some of them will be allowed to hatch and she will live again in them. He also knows that it is the Major Seniors who have made these decisions. He doesn’t question the Major Seniors. Do you, Lysander?”
Lysander was shocked into a response. “Oh, no! Not at all! Only—” He bit his lip. “Perhaps special exceptions might be made for people as valuable as MyThara.”
“And isn’t that a decision for the Major Seniors, too?” the tutor asked kindly.
Sandy shrugged self-consciously. He was tired of this discussion, which had been going on ever since they woke up. “We’re going to be late for shipwork,” he said, evading the question.
ChinTekki-tho accepted the change of subject. “Well,” he said, “that’s why I’m here this morning. What’s your shipwork for this morning?”
“Tending the food animals, ChinTekki-tho,” Bottom said respectfully. “The hoo’hik are cubbing.”
“Yes,” the tutor said thoughtfully. “Well, the herder will be a little short-handed today. I have a new instruction for you from the Major Seniors.”
The cohort all raised themselves slightly on their hind legs with interest. The tutor gazed at them benignly. “As you know,” he said, “Obie’s season came upon him yesterday and it interrupted our meeting with the Major Seniors.”
“We know that, all right,” Polly said cuttingly, glaring at Obie.
“The Major Seniors have recognized that if this were to occur during your Earth mission it might increase the risk. Suppose Bottom or Demetrius did it while you were in the middle of some important negotiation?”
Polly gasped. “Oh, ChinTekki-tho! You aren’t saying that you’ll give the boys something to keep them from entering a sexual phase?”
“No, nothing like that,” said the tutor, amiably crossing his legs. “The very opposite, in fact. The Major Seniors have directed that we bring on the male season now and get it over with. Then it will be six or twelve twelves of days before the problem comes up again.”
“Really?” Bottom cried. “You mean we’re going to do it now?”
The whole cohort was glowing until Polly cried, “But Obie just did it!”
“Of course,” ChinTekki-tho agreed. “Naturally we don’t want to do him again. One of you would probably get a reduced number of sperm cells, and you don’t want infertile eggs, do you? So we will excuse Oberon today.”
Obie looked downcast. All the females look horrified. Tanya gasped, “But then there’s only two males and three of us—”
“We thought of that,” the tutor said indulgently. “So I will accept a shot myself and join you.”
Amid the shouts of joy Obie wailed, “But what about me?”
“You’ll carry out regular shipwork, of course. Lysander, too. And, hear me, Lysander, when one is dejected for any reason it is good to work with the animals. I found that very soothing when I was cheth.”
If Genetics had been full of smells, the food-animal pens absolutely reeked. Sandy didn’t find it soothing at all. To get to the hoo’hik pens they had to pass the capped tanks filled with writhing, copulating, eating titch’hik, and that was not only unsoothing, it was hardly bearable. (What was it they were eating now—or whom? And what might they be eating a few days from now?) Sandy averted his eyes as he saw that other shipwork crews were respectfully lowering the two Hakh’hli corpses that were the day’s crop into the tanks even as they passed.
Sandy shuddered. At least he could take some comfort in the fact that this time he and Obie weren’t assigned to work with the bones or with the titch’hik. They didn’t have to swamp out the hoo’hik pens, either, because four of the females had littered a few twelfth-days earlier, and it was time to pith the cubs.