“It’ll take generations,” complained Mrrgrowr. “Let the young clean out the flabby ones!” said Quosmlizzak. “You know kids. They’ll eat anything, what!”
“Your young, perhaps,” said Mrrgrowr, with a snarl. “Not ours. We Xankatikitiki care about our progeny.”
“Our young, then,” laughed Quosmlizzak. “We have them by the clutch, a dozen or so. And as for our good friends like Stinky here, the Wulivery young are spawned in the sea, what? A million at a time?”
“Only a few hundred thousand at even the most splendid spawning,” murmured Odiferous Tentacle. “And only a few hundred survive to the parasitic larval stage when they cling to vullators. One does not consider them to be Wulivery until the vullator-clinging stage, and one does not name them until the second metamorphosis. Our young wouldn’t be useful in culling the flabby humans for they become land creatures only after the fifth stage, at which point they are almost adult.”
“You’ll want access to the oceans for your young, then?” asked Mrrgrowr.
The Wulivery waved its tentacles in negation. “No. Alas! Have you looked at their seas? Filthy! Also, the humans have so badly over-fished them that our young would find little to eat and might themselves end up as food for the few remaining whales! So amusing! The humans pretend to save the whales while they go on stealing the whales’ food until the whales starve! Ha ha. This world will have dead oceans, shortly. We have already planned to restock them with hybrids of the poisonous earthly puffer fish and equally noxious imported sea-creatures. Then we will eat the coastal humans who sully the sea while the new fish become food for our young but not for mankind. Until that is done, one fears this planet is too squalid for us to reproduce here.
“Hunting, however, will be good. We prefer hunting in shade, near clean water, as otherwise we get overheated. There’s plenty of prey along the sides of the jungles and woods. Enough to last us for years.”
‘Then you believe the humans will make an agreement with us?” asked Mrrgrowr.
“Oh,” murmured Odiferous Tentacle, “one thinks they will. They’ll ask us to eat the people in some other country, of course, so we’ll have to predate secretly in this country. Luckily, many of their peopledrop out orrun away, s o a few disappearances won’t be suspected.”
“Have any of the rest of you preyed on a smokeweed ingestor?” queried Quosmlizzak. “One tried to suck an ingestor a few days ago. It tasted so absolutely foul one had to disgorge the juices, and one is sure it would be deleterious to one’s health to eat many of them . . .”
“You’re quite right,” shuddered the Wulivery. “Terrible taste, and it stays with one so! The man, Bert, is one such. He stinks terribly! Do not ask me to share his flesh, thank you, no.”
“We’ll have to get rid of the bad ones,” remarked Mrrgrowr.
“Will the dear Pistach let us do that?” asked Odiferous Tentacle. “Will they go on causing us trouble?”
“The Pistach!” The Xankatikitiki barked with laughter. “The Wulivery haven’t heard? The Pistach may have no time to cause us anything! They’ll soon have a civil war on their hands.”
“What?” cried Quosmlizzak.
“No! The Pistach?” laughed Odiferous Tentacle. “How delicious!”
Mrrgrowr snarled, “It’s true. A rebel has built an army and taken ships! He has made an alliance with us. We have given him weapons and ships. Our people heard of him last on his way to Pistach-home. To conquer the planet!”
“Could that be why the Pistach brought Inkleozese with them when they returned?” asked Quosmlizzak.
Silence. The Wulivery made a spitting noise. The Xankatikitiki growled in their throats. “Is that true? Inkleozese? Drat them! What business did they have coming here?”
“We knew they’d come sooner or later,” soothed Odiferous Tentacle. “We’ll just stay out of their reach, that’s all.”
“Easier asserted than accomplished,” muttered the Xankatikitiki. “We went to considerable trouble wooing that Pistach rebel. Who would have thought of Inkleozese!”
“Well, they’re not allowed to … you know, not to members of the Confederation.”
“They do it to members of the Confederation,” asserted Quosmlizzak. “They find a legal precedent first, but they do it. Like, for instance if they come after us, they’ll claim we’re not actually members of the Confederation because if we were we wouldn’t be contravening its laws by being here . . .”