I can’t say I followed every detail of the story. There were a lot of references that went right past me, but there are plenty of those in Shakespeare, too. The basic story was clear enough … except that I kept thinking what a pity it was that I hadn’t had this experience while I was in graduate school. What a hell of a doctoral dissertation I could have written-maybe even one that somebody might actually have wanted to read.
Pirraghiz had gone about her own business while I was watching the bowl. She timed her return perfectly, coming back in just as the story finished, and she wasn’t alone. The male named Mrrranthoghrow was with her. After the two of them had greeted me, she looked at me apologetically. “Was any of that what you wanted to know?”
I came alive. “Not exactly. I was more interested in your field, technology, weapons, that sort of thing.”
“Not weapons,” he protested. “I have no experience with weapons. That is what the warriors and the Horch fighting machines are for.”
“All right then.” I pointed to the viewing bowl. “What makes that thing run?”
He scratched his beard. “Do you mean where the power comes from? There is a small unit in the base, which provides that. It is called a-“ I heard the word he said, but it meant nothing to me.
“Something like a battery?” I guessed. I used the English word, because I didn’t have one in Horch, but when I explained, “A device in which power from another source is stored, and released as needed,” he shook his great head.
“I have never seen the (incomprehensible) charged up, Dannerman. I know nothing of such matters; I am a mechanic, trained in that alone. The power in each machine comes from-“ he searched for a term I might understand, and came up with- “an accumulator, but what it accumulates, and what it accumulates it from, I do not know. Perhaps Djabeertapritch can tell you, if he wants to, but the Others had no reason to instruct me in such matters. When I disassembled and rebuilt the transit machine for the Horch, I knew what components needed to be connected in certain fashions, but I do not understand how it works.”
Suddenly there was a rush of hot blood to my brain. I stared at him. “You worked on the transit machine?”
“With others, yes.”
“And it is in working order?”
“Certainly. The cousin Horch use it all the time-for making copies, such as yourself, and also for tracing channels to other installations of the Others.”
I swallowed, my throat tight. “Strictly as a theoretical question,” I said-I didn’t want to scare him off too soon-“would it be possible for me to use that machine to, say, transmit me back to my planet?”
He looked startled, and so did Pirraghiz. “Oh, Dannerman,” she said sorrowfully, understanding at once what I was getting at.
So did Mrrranthoghrow. His voice was sympathetic as he said, “I am sorry, Dannerman. It is impossible.”
I wasn’t giving up, although my pulse was racing. “Why impossible? The Horch wouldn’t have to know! You could just smuggle me in-“
He was shaking that great, moon-faced head. “I could not do that without their consent, Dannerman,” he said gently. “But that is not the reason. It simply cannot be done. Nothing can be transmitted to any locus unless there is a receiver there, and die receiver in your Starlab has been destroyed.”
PART FIVE
Marooned
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
There was another little period of time there that I’d just as soon forget. The next days passed, but they took a long time doing it. Pirraghiz clucked over me and tried to cheer me up. She proposed entertainments, promised that Beert would soon come back with good news, produced tasty new meals-she did everything she could to cheer me, but I didn’t cheer. I was trying to adjust to the fact that I was marooned in this place for the rest of my life, while my world was going to hell… and there was nothing I could do about it.
I think I was a big frustration to Pirraghiz. She deserved better. She was my maid, valet, cook, and washerwoman and all-day-long companion. Life with her around was like living in a five-star luxury hotel, with my personal Jeeves to care for all my needs. If she had a life of her own, she didn’t let it interfere with her total attendance on me. She washed and mended my ragged clothes. She tended my chamber pot, whisking it away to be sterilized and cleaned before I had to use it again. She fed me about as well as I had ever been fed in my life-found new ways to improve the preserved swill from Starlab and added to it actual fresh vegetables, salads, soups, little cakes dripping with something like fruit-flavored honey. There was even milk. It didn’t come from an actual cow, of course, because there weren’t any of those within many light-years, but it was a sweetish, butterscotch-colored fluid that came, Pirraghiz said, from the females of one of the other captive species.
That startled me. “Don’t they object when you take their milk away from them?”
She wagged her great head reprovingly. “Don’t be foolish, Dannerman. It is not ‘taken.’ It is bartered. They give us things we do not have, and we give them things of ours in return. These females are well repaid for what they have in plenty to spare.”
I looked again at what was in my cup. But it still tasted good, and while I was checking it out Pirraghiz saw an opportunity. “I am glad that you are taking an interest in this, Dannerman. Would you like to know more about the other captive species?”
I considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “Why not?” I said, meaning, since I was going to be stuck here for the rest of my life, why not find out what that life was going to be like?
Pirraghiz beamed. “That is good, Dannerman. I thought you might feel so, and so I have prepared something for you. Wait one moment.” She disappeared into her own room, and when she came back she was carrying the familiar helmet.
It wasn’t what I had expected. I protested, “I’ve already seen all I need to see of what’s happening back home.”
“Oh, Dannerman,” she sighed. “Do you think it was only your people who were bugged? That is not so. Sentient beings of many, many different species have worn the transmitters, species you have never seen, of kinds you cannot imagine, including some of those who shared captivity with you. I could not find all of those in the records,” she said apologetically, “but I have selected a single individual from eight different species. Some of the species are here, some are not. Later on I can add others if you wish.”
She waited for me to make up my mind. I hefted the helmet for a moment, indecisively. Curiosity won. Gingerly I put it on and pulled down the flaps. I heard Pirraghiz’s voice giving last-minute instructions-“Simply say ‘next’ when you want to go to another subject, Dannerman, and I will make the change for you.” And then the helmet took over.
I was no longer myself. I wasn’t in my chamber in the Horch nest.
I was surrounded by total blackness. There was nothing to be seen, smelled or felt, except that there before me, not two meters away, was an image of a creature that looked like a frog with the mouth of an alligator. Its skin was as fuzzy as a peach, and more or less the same color. On one bony arm it wore a thing like a wristwatch, but that was glowing with a pale blue light, and there were three golden bracelets on the other. It was dressed in tunic and leggings of a shimmery, silky material. It had four large ears on each side of its elongated head, and a cluster of bright pink feathers topping it off-probably a hat or a decoration, I thought, since the feathers didn’t seem to be growing out of the creature’s skull.
It wasn’t moving at all. I figured that out easily enough; what I was looking at was just a picture, showing me what the first species Pirraghiz had selected for my viewing pleasure looked like; and in a moment the blackness winked away.
Now I wasn’t looking at the creature anymore. Now I was that creature. What I was looking at-and smelling and hearing and feeling-was a warm, sunny seaside. Gentle ocean waves were breaking on a pebbly beach, where two or three ungainly-looking catamarans were drawn up. I was sitting-squatting, actually- on the side of another catamaran, eating something that crunched in my jaws and tasted richly of blood. I was not alone. There were two other alligator-frogs just below me on the beach, doing something or other with large nets-repairing them, I supposed. I was looking particularly at one of them, and it was giving me occasional sidelong glances in return. I was conscious of a kind of warm stirring that felt like sexual tension as I looked at-I guess, at her. Unless, of course, that one was male and the body I was inhabiting was female, but I could think of no good way of checking that.