Chiddy didn’t reply. Instead he went over to Vess, who was dithering about in an agitated manner. Chiddy put his hand on Vess’s upper thorax, and the two of them simply stood there, unmoving, saying nothing, as though they had separated from the reality of now.
Chad whispered, “They don’t learn how to cope with unique challenges in their own lives. They only learn the systems, and how to make the systems work.”
“They have that saying, emergencies make their own rules.”
“Even so, the rules will be things they’ve done before, though perhaps in a different context.” He raised his voice. “I wish to hell I had something written about the Pistach people. Something that would give me some insight . . .”
Chiddy heard him and turned toward the two humans. He did it jerkily, reluctantly. “One . . . well, one has a journal that one began when one first talked with Benita. In it one has expressed thoughts and feelings about humankind and Pistach. One cannot say if these ideas are representative of Pistach people as a whole, but if you think they would help . . .”
“Oh, yes,” Benita cried. “Do let us see it, Chiddy. Or … is it written in Pistach?”
He made the expression she had grown to know as a smile, rather than as an expression of dismay or threat. “Oh, no, dearest Benita. One wrote it for you, so certainly it was written in a language you can understand. Otherwise one would be a mythologizer, a mystifier, no? Making mystic marks on sheets of precious metal or scribbling prophecies in languages long forgotten, to make oneself feel arcane and esoteric! If it is important to communicate, one does so in the language of the people.”
“Some fairly important religious messages have had to be deciphered on Earth,” Chad muttered.
“Nothing prevents a mythologizer from discovering a truth,” Chiddy said sadly, “or from misrepresenting it once he has done so, but one has always thought to find real truth emanating from many sources, written in multiple places, so to speak. Why would a communicator choose to speak or write a truth in only one place, in a language people could not understand?”
Chad cocked his head as Benita had seen him do when he was getting ready to debate a point, something he much enjoyed. “All that doesn’t matter,” Benita interrupted hastily. “You wanted something written, Chiddy has something written. So let’s read it.”
“One . . . wasn’t going to give it to you until your people had qualified for membership in the Confederation,” Chiddy confessed. “Strictly speaking, one shouldn’t be giving it to you at all, now. Nonmembers are not supposed to receive much information about the peoples of the Confederation, but . . . considering the way things are . . .”
He sighed heavily, the gill covers under his thorax plates fluttering in a soft chatter, like a winter wind moving through a last few dried leaves at the tip of a branch. Chiddy fetched a folder out of a cupboard and gave it to Chad, who sat down next to Benita to read it. The individual pages looked like handmade paper, and though the writing was a perfectly legible English cursive, it was somewhat crabbed and the spelling, though quite accurate phonetically, was highly original. Accordingly, the reading went slowly, and Chad and Benita grew quieter and quieter as they read on.
Chiddy’s journal made it clear why membership in the Confederation was important. They could not join without Tassifoduma, and if Earth didn’t get to that point, it was at the mercy of the predators. Not only the Wulivery, the Xankatikitiki and the Fluiquosm, but dozens of others, also, who lived farther toward the center of the galaxy but who would undoubtedly make the trip for such a very, very rich hunting ground.
“Remember the meeting before we left for Pistach,” Benita whispered to Chad, while Chiddy was concentrating on his dials and buttons, “when the president told me that it was of the utmost importance the envoys continue their work. He said most of the world leaders, the responsible ones, anyway, were agreed that this firm, outside pressure was bringing the positive changes no one had been able to bring about in the past.”