She stared pensively at the two newcomers. “Do sit down. I’ll deal. I picked up these cards on Fanancy. They are in all respects similar to Old Earthian, Western-style decks, except for the names and colors of the suits. Here the four suits are labor, management, love, and death, signified, by the shovel, the club, the heart, and the coffin, the colors silver, black, red, and brown.” She dealt rapidly, four hands, the fourth to an empty chair.
Ellin picked up her hand. She seemed to have an ace of labor and an ace of management, together with three face cards in love and death, and an assortment of minor management cards. “What game are we playing?” she asked.
“Three-handed Whustee,” said Questioner. “I bid one shovel.” Then, without waiting to hear their bids, she continued on the prior topic. “I sometimes grow weary of delay, however, and at such times I am tempted to rule arbitrarily, as God is said to do, to put an end to matters.”
“It is possible, tempting you?” asked Bao, his jaw dropped. Catching her peremptory gaze he murmured, “Two … ah, coffins.”
“It is not possible to tempt me,” said Questioner. “It is possible only for me to imagine the consequences of temptation.”
“Pass,” said Ellin.
“How long have you been the Questioner?” Bao asked.
“I bid three shovels.” She folded her hand and tapped it significantly on the tabletop. “We are the second assembly to hold the office. Two hundred sixty years ago, Questioner I was melted down in the cataclysm known as the Flagian Miscalculation, somewhere out near the Bonfires of Hell. The Flagians’ attempt to prove that matter was illusory succeeded only in redistributing that matter rather widely. We, Questioner II, took the place of our vaporized predecessor. Together, we have been questioning for over seven hundred standard years. We have learned a great deal about health and contentment, prosperity and pleasure, and we have found no reason to change Haraldson’s edicts defining opinion and providing for justice, though there are races that think differently.”
“Pass,” murmured Bao, into the momentary silence.
“Are there really?” cried Ellin, eyes wide. “Pass.”
Questioner chuckled, a mechanical sound. “My hand to play, I think. Turn up the other hand, please, it gets to be the macarthy. Fah. I hoped it would have the ace.
“To answer your question, yes. A century or so ago we encountered the Borash, no two of whom agree on anything, but who tell us it is their destiny to rule all other races. Luckily, they lack either the weapons or the will to enforce their doctrine. Before that it was the Korm, a hive race of absolutely uniform opinion. Only their worker class ‘think,’ and they can only think one thing at a time. The Korm believe they have been created to travel to another galaxy with a great message. They devote all their resources toward that eventuality, and they don’t even talk to us unless we have something their engineers say they need for the ships they have been building for the last four millennia. The ships have yet to be tested, and the great message, so I understand, is still to be determined by the committee that has been working on it for several thousand years.”
She paused for a moment, scanning their play thus far. “ … three, four, and five are mine. Now I will regret that ace!” She smiled. “Then, of course, there are the Quaggi.”
Bao frowned in concentration. “May I be asking what is Quaggi?”
“The Quaggi are an interstellar race of beings who, I infer, need the radiation in the vicinity of a star in order to reproduce. As a matter of fact, we may get to see the remains of one on this trip.”
“Remains?” faltered Ellin.
“Of a Quaggida, or Quaggima. I think this one was killed during mating. Or perhaps only injured so badly that she died. Whichever, she should be lying on a moonlet of the outmost planet of the system we’re about to visit. There’s no atmosphere, and if it hasn’t been blown apart by meteorites, it should still be there.”
“I don’t think I’ve even heard of Quaggi,” said Ellin.