She went back to bed, welcoming Sasquatch’s company close beside her. An hour later she gave up and called Chad.
He arrived in twenty minutes.
“What do you think it was?” he asked.
“Whatever’s doing all the stuff the First Lady told us about the other night! I mean, what else could it be? It wasn’t people. It, or they, were a lot bigger than people. It wasn’t anything native to Earth, that’s for sure. And whatever it was pushed Bert right up against the living room windows, and those windows are thirty feet off the sidewalk.”
She took a deep breath. “It wasn’t Chiddy and Vess because they come in here all the time, they don’t have to walk around on the roof, but I’ll bet it was some of those other races they talked about at that dinner, remember? Chiddy talked about predators who had to obey Confederation law, but only if we were in the Confederation. Remember, they said that’s why they wanted to move in such a hurry?”
He looked dazed, then angry, then gave her some news that hadn’t appeared on TV. People were still being killed. In India whole villages of them were wiped out around the perimeter of nature preserves. Also in Southeast Asia. Any activity requiring people to work out of sight in rural or primitive areas had pretty much stopped, because nobody could find crews willing to do it.
“The White House has asked the news media to report things that might concern the ET’s as calmly as possible with no screaming headlines. The president told the media that nothing now happening is under the control of any person. At this point, we believe we still have influence over what may happen, but any public outcry may move events beyond our abilities even to influence them.”
“This is getting serious, isn’t it?” she said.
“I simply wish your two ET friends hadn’t picked right now to take off where they can’t be reached. And I wish to hell they’d come back!”
From Chiddy’s journal
Dear Benita, I write this as we return toward your Earth from our sojourn in Pistach-home. We were not summoned home on a simple matter, as I had hoped. This was no confusion over royal egos but was, instead, a vast troubling over T’Fees the Turbulent, who has titled self Grand Something-or-other, ruler over three Pistach planets! In each case, T’Fees has moved in, talked the campesi into a fury, assaulted the more specialized castes, particularly selectors and athyci, and has begun training armies. Amazing, impossible that he should have been able to do this alone! How has this happened!
Vess and I were summoned home to answer to the Chapter about our work on Assurdo, which had resulted in this bizarre ligament of events. We self-examined our work. The only thing we might have done differently was to have regressed T’Fees, but the guidelines tell us never to do that unless necessary, and in T’Fees’s case, no one had known it was necessary. Luckily, the three planets T’Fees has conquered are low-tech planets, which means they can be easily assailed with high-tech modifiers, such as those we have used on your Earth, dear Benita. A surreptitious seeding of nanobots has been done on all three worlds. The nanobots suspended everyone on the planet, and teams from both Pistach-home and several of our high-tech worlds are even now descending to do regressions on all army trainees. We hoped to find T’Fees and his coterie, a group said to be more intelligent and active than most, but unfortunately they were not on any of the planets we invaded. How did they escape us, and where have they gone?
Our fear is that they may have taken refuge with some other race of the Confederation, not all of whom are sympathetic with our ways. Sometimes I wish we could use nanobots on other races, but all other Confederation members have defensive bots to prevent our “taking them over,” as though we would want to! Providing them with bots of their own was part of our original peace process, what Vess and I sometimes call our balance of error.
There was nothing we could do to help this situation, and the Chapter agreed it was not our fault. Biological sports like T’Fees are not anyone’s fault. They just happen. You have had your Attilas and Hitlers and Milosevics,- we have had our K’fars and M’quogjums, et al., though they were far, far in the past, in pre-Mengatowhai times. When we catch up to T’Fees, be assured he will be analyzed from heelspur to carapace! Though we will be kept apprised of what goes on in the T’Fees matter, the Chapter, having heard disturbing news concerning predation on your world, urged us to get back to our work as soon as possible.