Post by Lorpius Prime on Jan 24, 2013 7:03:57 GMT -5
Pascual was not sure what he had expected. Even before the doors of the car had slid apart, the air began to fill with a faintly acidic smell and the low thrum of a huge but distant noise enveloped them. When the train stopped and opened for their departure, both of these sensations rose to a nearly overpowering level. Pascual actually staggered back a step, and he could see Dr. Poplawski raise a hand to cover his already masked nose.
A platoon of Tadpoles wearing the same armored coats as the four inside the car stood in tight formation just beyond the doors. They held back a raucous assembly of their kin in motley dress who were stretching their necks and pressing forward as they attempted to see into the train, shouting and pointing much like Humans would at any grand spectacle on Earth.
On Earth, however, Pascual would have had no trouble reading the mood of a crowd of humans. Here, was not sure if he was looking at common gawkers, or the start of a riot. Though the temperature was nearly as cold as it had been back at the docking bay, Pascual could feel himself beginning to sweat.
The other Tadpoles in the train also seemed to have been caught off guard by the scene. The four bodyguards lined up to block the doorway, and kept hands on the club hammers at their belts. Captain Pakpeden leaned over their shoulders and shouted towards the armored Tadpoles outside. One of them jogged back and had a rapid, gurgling conversation.
Unable to understand their speech, Pascual and the other Humans looked to Rokden.
"The crowd is greater than we anticipated," Rokden said slowly. He turned his head, perhaps listening to Pakpeden's conversation before continuing. "Apparently there has been—"
Elder Morh snapped something. Rokden glanced at her for a moment before turning back to the Humans.
"Apparently many have come from other residential sections," he finished.
"It is an inconvenience," Morh said in English, "but not anything to worry about. We had decided that a brief public address was appropriate, but now I see that we should simply have used a broadcast, I apologize."
Captain Pakpeden broke off from his conversation with the Tadpole in uniform and said a few words to Morh.
"The guards will clear us a path," Morh translated.
Pascual felt a hand grip his shoulder. "Will we be safe out there?" Nadia asked.
Morh glanced at the crowd, "Why would you not be?"
"That's a very large crowd to hold back with only a few dozen men."
Elder Morh looked back at her without an answer. Eventually it was Rokden who said, "They will not attempt to harm us."
Morh seemed to catch up with this train of thought. "The crowd is simply an obstacle to movement," she said. "You are in no danger here."
Reluctantly, Nadia let her hand slip from Pascual's shoulder and she stepped backwards.
Pakpeden gestured them towards the door. In a low voice he asked, "Should I understand that large groups of your own species are a threat?"
"If there is a riot," Pascual tried to sound casual as he explained. "Or a panic, people have been trampled in confusion."
"We are not so reckless," Morh said. Her inflection was nearly flat, but Pascual's mind added a great deal of haughtiness to the statement. She strode easily through the doors and into the pocket of open space which the half-circle of guards were defending. Rokden followed a few steps behind.
Pascual took a deep breath and led his own people out after them. Captain Pakpeden and the four bodyguards brought up the rear. Controlled by some unseen conductor or computer, the car doors closed at their backs.
"Lead on," Pascual said to no one in particular. The noise coming from the throngs of Tadpoles in front of them was such that he could hardly hear himself, anyway.
They walked. From what Pascual could see beyond the crowd and within their own small circle of space, they appeared to be in the Tadpole equivalent of some inner-city parkland. Their steps fell upon hard-packed and dusty gray dirt sprinkled with thin and much-trod-upon black vegetation just barely clinging to life. Occasional bits of plastic and organic trash crinkled underfoot.
There were buildings in the distance, broad structures built with gently curving lines rather than regular facings. If they had been on Earth, Pascual would have estimated them to rise about five stories before meeting the ceiling, but he could not guess how much space the Tadpoles used for each of their floors, assuming the buildings were multi-level at all.
The ceiling made it feel very strange, of course. There appeared to be a sun, softer and yellower than Earth's. The way it seemed to hang well above the ceiling itself suggested a sophisticated hologram. But the existence of the roof was somewhat unsettling to a person used to true open skies.
It reminded Pascual a bit of old pictures he'd seen of the indoor novelty resorts that had once been built in cities of the Persian Gulf. None of them had survived the wars of the '30s and '40s, of course. All that was left were a few burned-out husks, monuments to ancient extravagance and hubris. But before turning to ruin, they had been quite the sight to behold.
Pascual and his companions had to have walked more than half a mile before reaching their destination, even though the strange visuals made it seem like a much shorter distance. Eventually they stopped at a dilapidated, white washed gazebo that really could have been transplanted directly from any of thousands of parks on Earth. Pascual promptly plopped himself down on one of the high, backless benches inside. Despite the cool temperature, he now felt quite hot and a little out of breath. Dr. Poplawski and Elder Rokden both joined him, while the others at least put up a good show of being in better condition. Pascual told himself that it was probably due to the time he'd spent in minimal gravity. He was no exercise nut, but he had done at least this much walking daily back in Caracas.
At the edge of the gazebo, Elder Morh had lifted her arms above her head and was waving slowly to the crowd. She stepped up on a low wall to see over the heads of the guards now ringing the pavilion.
After a few moments of waving, she shouted a few words in her own language. Even without amplification, her voice was quite loud and its low tones carried remarkably well. It sounded like thunder booming in the distance.
Eventually, the noise from the crowd began to die down, leaving only a slight buzz in Pascual's ears. A few seconds later, he wrinkled his nose as the air changed. The faintly acidic smell was replaced by a twinge of rotting vegetables.
Morh's arms fell back to her sides, but she continued to yell slow, deliberate phrases. Pascual noticed that she seemed to have an echo in the distance. There were Tadpoles in the crowd, single individuals about a hundred meters away in different directions, who were repeating Morh's words as she spoke them. A verbal relay instead of microphones and strategically placed speakers? Pascual wondered if the system still had to be arranged beforehand or if this was normal, automatic behavior for Tadpole public events.
Pascual leaned forward and whispered to Rokden, "May I ask what she is saying?"
"The words are mostly formalities," Rokden muttered. "But she is trying to communicate a feeling of hope, and a bit of excitement." He pointed towards the Enharg at the back of his head to indicate what he meant by "communicate". Then he paused for a moment. "She is having moderate success."
"So this is what hope smells like?" Dr. Poplawski asked, his eyes were watering a bit.
Rokden chuckled, a low, stuttering gurgle. "I had an idea, as we were making our return voyage. I suspect that Humans, in your art, do not describe the olfactory experience of a place by its emotional associations as we would."
Pascual nodded, "I suppose such associations would be mostly metaphorical for us."
"I see," Rokden said. "Perhaps we will have to lend you some poets once this crisis is behind us."
It was Pascual's turn to chuckle. "You know Amb—Elder. I've never been much of an art appreciator myself, but I am certain that there are some museum directors and others who would absolutely love that idea. I shall have to suggest it to them."
And he pulled his PDA out of his pocket to make a note, because it really did sound like an excellent notion. Being a diplomat wasn't always about gritty politics and negotiated advantages.
"We discovered long ago that the Charterlings had very little concept of art or beauty," Rokden went on. "I always found that a little sad."
"The Bats and Kyhyex seem like they're pretty much the same." Pascual put his PDA away again. "Well, I suppose the Bats must have some kind of aesthetic sense, since they use a lot of visual symbols. But I've definitely never heard a Bat discuss poetry."
"It is our understanding that the civilized Kyhyex actually devote the majority of their efforts to creating great works of art and culture. Though I have trouble imagining what their concept of taste must look like."
Pascual shook his head, "The civilized Ky—?"
But his question was cut short by a great roar from the surrounding crowd. Elder Morh turned around and held out an arm towards him.
"Ambassador Molinas," she said, "would you and the others please step over here for a moment, where you may be seen."
"Uh…" Pascual fumbled his words for a moment as he tried to catch up to his surroundings. "Sure," he said at last, standing up, "sure."
He and the others walked over to Morh, where she and Captain Pakpeden helped them to climb up onto the gazebo wall to stand beside her.
Morh looked to the crowd again, raised her arms, and warbled loudly. The sea of Tadpoles screamed back at her, possibly repeating her words back, but Pascual could not tell.
In a calmer tone, the Elder said, "We are grateful for the assistance of your species, Ambassador Molinas. I do not know if you can truly understand how grateful, but I hope what you see here may communicate at least a portion of it. You have saved the lives of everyone you see here from a slow and miserable death. They will not forget it. Ever."
Beside him, Dr. Poplawski sniffed and rubbed at his damp cheeks. Pascual scanned the endless, quivering sea of Tadpoles roaring with huge, gaping mouths at him. He could not read Tadpole facial expressions, was not sure if Tadpoles even truly had facial expressions. They might all have easily been shouting insults or drooling for his flesh. But he tried his best to imagine that they were grinning in glorious elation and shouting words of thanks.
After a few minutes of trying, their faces began to look almost Human in his mind's eye. The feeling of lightness in his heart was a thing without compare.
Pascual waved back to the crowd, and pretended not to notice the tears running down his own face.
"What was that request, Operative?"
Yenga Goying doubted that Commander Horexker had misheard her. But she repeated herself anyway.
"I said, Commander, since I have no new intelligence of interest, department status changes, nor requisitions, that I would like your permission to be absent from today's staff meeting."
Yenga kept her posture stiff and her eyes locked on the Commander's as she waited for his response. She could not tell if Horexker was angry with her, or simply confused.
"Just because you do not have anything to report does not mean the others will have no need of you. What if the Ambassador or the consular staff has a question for your department?"
Despite her determination to maintain her confident appearance, Yenga could feel herself slumping.
"Then I humbly request you to pass on my apologies, and I will make myself available to them this evening."
"That would seem to defeat the purpose of the staff meeting in the first place, Operative Yengagoying."
"Commander…" Yenga trailed off, searching for the right words and trying to contain her frustration. "Ambassador Goyeharg does not ask me questions in the staff meetings. He waits until after and then summons me to his office alone. And rarely because he wants an actual answer. He does this to play with me. Like I used to be one of his toys and now he's both insulted and fascinated that I have gained an independent consciousness."
That was much more explicit than Yenga had intended. She took a moment to focus on stopping the fluttering of her wings and wrapping them once more tightly around her arms. Then she sighed.
"I do not believe that I am in proper mental condition to tolerate that behavior right now. The intelligence department has nothing to report today. I would be grateful if you could relay that message for me at the meeting without requiring me to attend in person."
Horexker gazed silently back at her from behind his desk. The stocky warrior was unimaginative, undiplomatic, and a Consequentialist, but Yenga had always respected his professionalism. It had not been easy for her to ask this favor of him. But now she thought that she might be seeing some small measure of sympathy in his expression.
"You have a duty to serve the Ambassador, Operative. The same duty that I have, and our personal feelings and opinions are of no consequence to that duty. If you cannot perform the tasks expected of your office, for any reason, then it is your duty to step aside for a more effective replacement."
"I understand, Commander. And I agree. If you require my presence at the staff meeting, then I shall attend. I would simply… prefer to have your leave on this day."
Another long silence stretched between them until Horexker said, "Very well, Operative. I grant you leave from today's staff meeting." He seemed to relax a little. "Please find a way to either overcome or contain your frustrations with this job in the future. I will not be happy to have this conversation a second time."
"Thank you, Commander," Yenga said, unable to hide the relief in her voice. She saluted, then turned and strode out of Horexker's office after he gestured his dismissal.
Elder Morh excused herself from the tour group as they were boarding the railcar after the speech in the park. After a long conversation with Rokden, Captain Pakpeden did the same. The doors closed and the train hummed away with just the five Humans, Elder Rokden, and the four Tadpole guards which had first greeted them at the airlock.
"That should be all for the public formalities," Rokden said. "The Captain may rejoin us later, but we can take our time now. Are you all in need of rest or food?"
Pascual was hungry, and his stomach groaned slightly at the mention of food. But they were strictly forbidden from consuming anything on the Tadpole ship. After what happened to Lieutenant Muyskens, even Pascual would not have wanted to take the risk.
Perhaps fearing that his appetite was about to betray his willpower, Nadia answered Rokden before Pascual could. "We're fine, Elder," she said.
Rokden nodded. "I'm having the car take us through some of the other public sections. There are some things there which I would like you to see, even though they may not give the best impression."
Pascual quirked an eyebrow, but said nothing. He took up a position near the tram windows. His legs ached slightly, but there were no seats in the car for either Humans or Tadpoles.
For several minutes their track led through closed, empty tunnels. Impressive as engineering of a ship so enormous and complicated must have been, Pascual's mind was already growing bored with looking at nothing but metal walls and conduits. He looked around the car to see Lieutenants Yatskaya and Ellis still wearing looks of utter fascination as they peered out the windows. Dr. Poplawski, on the other hand, was fiddling with the strap of his facemask, and appeared lost in thought.
The tram emerged from the tunnels into a huge, dimly lit space. It took a moment for Pascual to realize that they were passing above a space much like the one they had just explored with Elder Morh. The tracks clung to the ceiling, passing near another holographic sun, this one gray and weak. Below was a vast field of ground surrounded by low buildings in what Pascual could now see were several concentric circles broken up by thin alleyways.
Pascual's nose stung as he realized the temperature in the car had dropped another five degrees, and his shoulders trembled in a brief shiver. He pressed his forehead against the window to get a better look at the area below, the moisture in his breath fortunately blocked by his mask.
"This is—" Elder Rokden said a word in his own language that sounded rather like a whale groaning, "—residence. It is one of the primary residential areas, like you saw before, designed to house up to a hundred thousand individuals."
The Tadpole elder stepped next to Pascual at the window, and ran the fingertips of one hand along its transparent surface. Pascual looked at the dark surface of the ground below. Tiny, irregularly shaped structures filled the whole landscape, wedged together without plan and hardly a footpath of space between. Amidst the chaos Pascual could just make out a few specks, visible only thanks to their motion, which must be Tadpoles milling about below.
"How many?" Dr. Poplawski asked, his voice barely rising over a whisper.
"Nearly eight hundred thousand at last count. It will be more after today."
An image surfaced in Pascual's memory, a photograph from one of his grade school history textbooks. A Red Cross worker had snapped it with her phone while standing on a hill just inside a Chinese refugee camp in Burma just after the Straits War. It showed the most wretched collection of Human souls ever gathered in one spot. Most of the people inside had no shelter to speak of, which would have mattered more if they'd had enough space to lie down. No one knew how many people had been shoveled into that one camp, because the refugees were still streaming in two years later when the Burmese military tried to wipe them out. But just from that one photograph, the number was estimated to have been at least one and a half million people. And there'd been dozens of identical camps scattered across Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, and India.
That was the memory brought to Pascual's mind by the Tadpoles down there. Pitiful wretches squeezed together in a desperate hope for nothing more than a patch of ground to rest upon and another day to live. But the Chinese had only been driven into that plight after their cities had been burned and their farms scraped clean of every bit of food. The Tadpoles…
"Why?" he asked Rokden, only half-conscious that he was the one who spoke.
"Overconfidence," the Tadpole said. "Our support machinery proved more durable than we expected. Eventually it was decided that we did not need to be nearly so ruthless about controlling our population, as the safety margins were so much larger. Of course the equipment did eventually begin to break down. But by then we were existing right at the limits of our capacity."
Rokden slowly swiveled his head from side to side.
"Shutting down a powerplant just to perform maintenance meant hundreds of people would suffocate. But even more were dying from catastrophic and irreparable failures. So we tried to stretch the systems out as far as we could, sacrificing as few as we dared in order to keep everything running with the fewest possible interruptions. It never worked as well as we hoped, though. We always had to keep the engines powered or the ship would have been torn apart by dust. So we were constantly herded into smaller and smaller portions of the ship, whatever the rest of our power and recycling systems could maintain."
"So how many of you are left?" Lieutenant Ellis asked. Then he looked down at his feet, "Er…"
But Rokden did not seem offended. "Twenty four million," he said. "It is still much more than we left with. And we have sufficient energy now that we are not travelling. But the other systems are still breaking down. The oxygen reclamation machines in another of our large habitats failed just an hour before you arrived." He paused for a moment, "Elder Morh was embarrassed and irritated because it meant the crowd you saw was larger than anticipated. But such sudden unforeseen hardships have become common for us during the past centuries. I am not ashamed to explain our situation to you, I think it is the only way you could understand."
Pascual's ears perked up. If he wasn't mistaken, Rokden was uncertain that he should have said anything he just had, and was looking for validation. It was such an endearingly Human emotional reaction that Pascual had to fight the urge to smile.
"I appreciate the explanation, Elder," he said, and wondered if the Tadpoles understood enough about inflection for his voice to actually have the soothing effect he wanted. "Thank you. And I do believe I understand your plight a little better. It's not the sort of situation many of us have ever imagined, much less experienced personally. You must have… well, I'll say that I think you ought to at least feel proud that you have survived despite the obstacles you faced. And I'm proud that we can help you to overcome this last one."
For a long while, no one said anything. Pascual watched Rokden's Enharg slowly contract until it looked like the back half of his skull and torso had vanished. Then the Tadpole Elder bowed his head in a single, deliberate nod.
"Thank you. Many of us have wondered if Humans could understand… emotions, in the same way that we do, since you lack the senses to share them directly. But I think that you do. Proud is a good word. That is what I feel."
"Fly away, little ones," Casey Rukavina said to no one in particular. On his dimmed monitor, a clock counted its way down to zero and began to flash. Although he could not hear the sound, he knew that the seals of 117 cylinders of cooled helium gas had just been opened to space.
Casey shut off the display and closed his eyes. He imagined that he was in the center of a globe of fireflies. He waved his arms and the little cloud of brilliant creatures started and zoomed away while he laughed.
A platoon of Tadpoles wearing the same armored coats as the four inside the car stood in tight formation just beyond the doors. They held back a raucous assembly of their kin in motley dress who were stretching their necks and pressing forward as they attempted to see into the train, shouting and pointing much like Humans would at any grand spectacle on Earth.
On Earth, however, Pascual would have had no trouble reading the mood of a crowd of humans. Here, was not sure if he was looking at common gawkers, or the start of a riot. Though the temperature was nearly as cold as it had been back at the docking bay, Pascual could feel himself beginning to sweat.
The other Tadpoles in the train also seemed to have been caught off guard by the scene. The four bodyguards lined up to block the doorway, and kept hands on the club hammers at their belts. Captain Pakpeden leaned over their shoulders and shouted towards the armored Tadpoles outside. One of them jogged back and had a rapid, gurgling conversation.
Unable to understand their speech, Pascual and the other Humans looked to Rokden.
"The crowd is greater than we anticipated," Rokden said slowly. He turned his head, perhaps listening to Pakpeden's conversation before continuing. "Apparently there has been—"
Elder Morh snapped something. Rokden glanced at her for a moment before turning back to the Humans.
"Apparently many have come from other residential sections," he finished.
"It is an inconvenience," Morh said in English, "but not anything to worry about. We had decided that a brief public address was appropriate, but now I see that we should simply have used a broadcast, I apologize."
Captain Pakpeden broke off from his conversation with the Tadpole in uniform and said a few words to Morh.
"The guards will clear us a path," Morh translated.
Pascual felt a hand grip his shoulder. "Will we be safe out there?" Nadia asked.
Morh glanced at the crowd, "Why would you not be?"
"That's a very large crowd to hold back with only a few dozen men."
Elder Morh looked back at her without an answer. Eventually it was Rokden who said, "They will not attempt to harm us."
Morh seemed to catch up with this train of thought. "The crowd is simply an obstacle to movement," she said. "You are in no danger here."
Reluctantly, Nadia let her hand slip from Pascual's shoulder and she stepped backwards.
Pakpeden gestured them towards the door. In a low voice he asked, "Should I understand that large groups of your own species are a threat?"
"If there is a riot," Pascual tried to sound casual as he explained. "Or a panic, people have been trampled in confusion."
"We are not so reckless," Morh said. Her inflection was nearly flat, but Pascual's mind added a great deal of haughtiness to the statement. She strode easily through the doors and into the pocket of open space which the half-circle of guards were defending. Rokden followed a few steps behind.
Pascual took a deep breath and led his own people out after them. Captain Pakpeden and the four bodyguards brought up the rear. Controlled by some unseen conductor or computer, the car doors closed at their backs.
"Lead on," Pascual said to no one in particular. The noise coming from the throngs of Tadpoles in front of them was such that he could hardly hear himself, anyway.
They walked. From what Pascual could see beyond the crowd and within their own small circle of space, they appeared to be in the Tadpole equivalent of some inner-city parkland. Their steps fell upon hard-packed and dusty gray dirt sprinkled with thin and much-trod-upon black vegetation just barely clinging to life. Occasional bits of plastic and organic trash crinkled underfoot.
There were buildings in the distance, broad structures built with gently curving lines rather than regular facings. If they had been on Earth, Pascual would have estimated them to rise about five stories before meeting the ceiling, but he could not guess how much space the Tadpoles used for each of their floors, assuming the buildings were multi-level at all.
The ceiling made it feel very strange, of course. There appeared to be a sun, softer and yellower than Earth's. The way it seemed to hang well above the ceiling itself suggested a sophisticated hologram. But the existence of the roof was somewhat unsettling to a person used to true open skies.
It reminded Pascual a bit of old pictures he'd seen of the indoor novelty resorts that had once been built in cities of the Persian Gulf. None of them had survived the wars of the '30s and '40s, of course. All that was left were a few burned-out husks, monuments to ancient extravagance and hubris. But before turning to ruin, they had been quite the sight to behold.
Pascual and his companions had to have walked more than half a mile before reaching their destination, even though the strange visuals made it seem like a much shorter distance. Eventually they stopped at a dilapidated, white washed gazebo that really could have been transplanted directly from any of thousands of parks on Earth. Pascual promptly plopped himself down on one of the high, backless benches inside. Despite the cool temperature, he now felt quite hot and a little out of breath. Dr. Poplawski and Elder Rokden both joined him, while the others at least put up a good show of being in better condition. Pascual told himself that it was probably due to the time he'd spent in minimal gravity. He was no exercise nut, but he had done at least this much walking daily back in Caracas.
At the edge of the gazebo, Elder Morh had lifted her arms above her head and was waving slowly to the crowd. She stepped up on a low wall to see over the heads of the guards now ringing the pavilion.
After a few moments of waving, she shouted a few words in her own language. Even without amplification, her voice was quite loud and its low tones carried remarkably well. It sounded like thunder booming in the distance.
Eventually, the noise from the crowd began to die down, leaving only a slight buzz in Pascual's ears. A few seconds later, he wrinkled his nose as the air changed. The faintly acidic smell was replaced by a twinge of rotting vegetables.
Morh's arms fell back to her sides, but she continued to yell slow, deliberate phrases. Pascual noticed that she seemed to have an echo in the distance. There were Tadpoles in the crowd, single individuals about a hundred meters away in different directions, who were repeating Morh's words as she spoke them. A verbal relay instead of microphones and strategically placed speakers? Pascual wondered if the system still had to be arranged beforehand or if this was normal, automatic behavior for Tadpole public events.
Pascual leaned forward and whispered to Rokden, "May I ask what she is saying?"
"The words are mostly formalities," Rokden muttered. "But she is trying to communicate a feeling of hope, and a bit of excitement." He pointed towards the Enharg at the back of his head to indicate what he meant by "communicate". Then he paused for a moment. "She is having moderate success."
"So this is what hope smells like?" Dr. Poplawski asked, his eyes were watering a bit.
Rokden chuckled, a low, stuttering gurgle. "I had an idea, as we were making our return voyage. I suspect that Humans, in your art, do not describe the olfactory experience of a place by its emotional associations as we would."
Pascual nodded, "I suppose such associations would be mostly metaphorical for us."
"I see," Rokden said. "Perhaps we will have to lend you some poets once this crisis is behind us."
It was Pascual's turn to chuckle. "You know Amb—Elder. I've never been much of an art appreciator myself, but I am certain that there are some museum directors and others who would absolutely love that idea. I shall have to suggest it to them."
And he pulled his PDA out of his pocket to make a note, because it really did sound like an excellent notion. Being a diplomat wasn't always about gritty politics and negotiated advantages.
"We discovered long ago that the Charterlings had very little concept of art or beauty," Rokden went on. "I always found that a little sad."
"The Bats and Kyhyex seem like they're pretty much the same." Pascual put his PDA away again. "Well, I suppose the Bats must have some kind of aesthetic sense, since they use a lot of visual symbols. But I've definitely never heard a Bat discuss poetry."
"It is our understanding that the civilized Kyhyex actually devote the majority of their efforts to creating great works of art and culture. Though I have trouble imagining what their concept of taste must look like."
Pascual shook his head, "The civilized Ky—?"
But his question was cut short by a great roar from the surrounding crowd. Elder Morh turned around and held out an arm towards him.
"Ambassador Molinas," she said, "would you and the others please step over here for a moment, where you may be seen."
"Uh…" Pascual fumbled his words for a moment as he tried to catch up to his surroundings. "Sure," he said at last, standing up, "sure."
He and the others walked over to Morh, where she and Captain Pakpeden helped them to climb up onto the gazebo wall to stand beside her.
Morh looked to the crowd again, raised her arms, and warbled loudly. The sea of Tadpoles screamed back at her, possibly repeating her words back, but Pascual could not tell.
In a calmer tone, the Elder said, "We are grateful for the assistance of your species, Ambassador Molinas. I do not know if you can truly understand how grateful, but I hope what you see here may communicate at least a portion of it. You have saved the lives of everyone you see here from a slow and miserable death. They will not forget it. Ever."
Beside him, Dr. Poplawski sniffed and rubbed at his damp cheeks. Pascual scanned the endless, quivering sea of Tadpoles roaring with huge, gaping mouths at him. He could not read Tadpole facial expressions, was not sure if Tadpoles even truly had facial expressions. They might all have easily been shouting insults or drooling for his flesh. But he tried his best to imagine that they were grinning in glorious elation and shouting words of thanks.
After a few minutes of trying, their faces began to look almost Human in his mind's eye. The feeling of lightness in his heart was a thing without compare.
Pascual waved back to the crowd, and pretended not to notice the tears running down his own face.
* * *
"What was that request, Operative?"
Yenga Goying doubted that Commander Horexker had misheard her. But she repeated herself anyway.
"I said, Commander, since I have no new intelligence of interest, department status changes, nor requisitions, that I would like your permission to be absent from today's staff meeting."
Yenga kept her posture stiff and her eyes locked on the Commander's as she waited for his response. She could not tell if Horexker was angry with her, or simply confused.
"Just because you do not have anything to report does not mean the others will have no need of you. What if the Ambassador or the consular staff has a question for your department?"
Despite her determination to maintain her confident appearance, Yenga could feel herself slumping.
"Then I humbly request you to pass on my apologies, and I will make myself available to them this evening."
"That would seem to defeat the purpose of the staff meeting in the first place, Operative Yengagoying."
"Commander…" Yenga trailed off, searching for the right words and trying to contain her frustration. "Ambassador Goyeharg does not ask me questions in the staff meetings. He waits until after and then summons me to his office alone. And rarely because he wants an actual answer. He does this to play with me. Like I used to be one of his toys and now he's both insulted and fascinated that I have gained an independent consciousness."
That was much more explicit than Yenga had intended. She took a moment to focus on stopping the fluttering of her wings and wrapping them once more tightly around her arms. Then she sighed.
"I do not believe that I am in proper mental condition to tolerate that behavior right now. The intelligence department has nothing to report today. I would be grateful if you could relay that message for me at the meeting without requiring me to attend in person."
Horexker gazed silently back at her from behind his desk. The stocky warrior was unimaginative, undiplomatic, and a Consequentialist, but Yenga had always respected his professionalism. It had not been easy for her to ask this favor of him. But now she thought that she might be seeing some small measure of sympathy in his expression.
"You have a duty to serve the Ambassador, Operative. The same duty that I have, and our personal feelings and opinions are of no consequence to that duty. If you cannot perform the tasks expected of your office, for any reason, then it is your duty to step aside for a more effective replacement."
"I understand, Commander. And I agree. If you require my presence at the staff meeting, then I shall attend. I would simply… prefer to have your leave on this day."
Another long silence stretched between them until Horexker said, "Very well, Operative. I grant you leave from today's staff meeting." He seemed to relax a little. "Please find a way to either overcome or contain your frustrations with this job in the future. I will not be happy to have this conversation a second time."
"Thank you, Commander," Yenga said, unable to hide the relief in her voice. She saluted, then turned and strode out of Horexker's office after he gestured his dismissal.
* * *
Elder Morh excused herself from the tour group as they were boarding the railcar after the speech in the park. After a long conversation with Rokden, Captain Pakpeden did the same. The doors closed and the train hummed away with just the five Humans, Elder Rokden, and the four Tadpole guards which had first greeted them at the airlock.
"That should be all for the public formalities," Rokden said. "The Captain may rejoin us later, but we can take our time now. Are you all in need of rest or food?"
Pascual was hungry, and his stomach groaned slightly at the mention of food. But they were strictly forbidden from consuming anything on the Tadpole ship. After what happened to Lieutenant Muyskens, even Pascual would not have wanted to take the risk.
Perhaps fearing that his appetite was about to betray his willpower, Nadia answered Rokden before Pascual could. "We're fine, Elder," she said.
Rokden nodded. "I'm having the car take us through some of the other public sections. There are some things there which I would like you to see, even though they may not give the best impression."
Pascual quirked an eyebrow, but said nothing. He took up a position near the tram windows. His legs ached slightly, but there were no seats in the car for either Humans or Tadpoles.
For several minutes their track led through closed, empty tunnels. Impressive as engineering of a ship so enormous and complicated must have been, Pascual's mind was already growing bored with looking at nothing but metal walls and conduits. He looked around the car to see Lieutenants Yatskaya and Ellis still wearing looks of utter fascination as they peered out the windows. Dr. Poplawski, on the other hand, was fiddling with the strap of his facemask, and appeared lost in thought.
The tram emerged from the tunnels into a huge, dimly lit space. It took a moment for Pascual to realize that they were passing above a space much like the one they had just explored with Elder Morh. The tracks clung to the ceiling, passing near another holographic sun, this one gray and weak. Below was a vast field of ground surrounded by low buildings in what Pascual could now see were several concentric circles broken up by thin alleyways.
Pascual's nose stung as he realized the temperature in the car had dropped another five degrees, and his shoulders trembled in a brief shiver. He pressed his forehead against the window to get a better look at the area below, the moisture in his breath fortunately blocked by his mask.
"This is—" Elder Rokden said a word in his own language that sounded rather like a whale groaning, "—residence. It is one of the primary residential areas, like you saw before, designed to house up to a hundred thousand individuals."
The Tadpole elder stepped next to Pascual at the window, and ran the fingertips of one hand along its transparent surface. Pascual looked at the dark surface of the ground below. Tiny, irregularly shaped structures filled the whole landscape, wedged together without plan and hardly a footpath of space between. Amidst the chaos Pascual could just make out a few specks, visible only thanks to their motion, which must be Tadpoles milling about below.
"How many?" Dr. Poplawski asked, his voice barely rising over a whisper.
"Nearly eight hundred thousand at last count. It will be more after today."
An image surfaced in Pascual's memory, a photograph from one of his grade school history textbooks. A Red Cross worker had snapped it with her phone while standing on a hill just inside a Chinese refugee camp in Burma just after the Straits War. It showed the most wretched collection of Human souls ever gathered in one spot. Most of the people inside had no shelter to speak of, which would have mattered more if they'd had enough space to lie down. No one knew how many people had been shoveled into that one camp, because the refugees were still streaming in two years later when the Burmese military tried to wipe them out. But just from that one photograph, the number was estimated to have been at least one and a half million people. And there'd been dozens of identical camps scattered across Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, and India.
That was the memory brought to Pascual's mind by the Tadpoles down there. Pitiful wretches squeezed together in a desperate hope for nothing more than a patch of ground to rest upon and another day to live. But the Chinese had only been driven into that plight after their cities had been burned and their farms scraped clean of every bit of food. The Tadpoles…
"Why?" he asked Rokden, only half-conscious that he was the one who spoke.
"Overconfidence," the Tadpole said. "Our support machinery proved more durable than we expected. Eventually it was decided that we did not need to be nearly so ruthless about controlling our population, as the safety margins were so much larger. Of course the equipment did eventually begin to break down. But by then we were existing right at the limits of our capacity."
Rokden slowly swiveled his head from side to side.
"Shutting down a powerplant just to perform maintenance meant hundreds of people would suffocate. But even more were dying from catastrophic and irreparable failures. So we tried to stretch the systems out as far as we could, sacrificing as few as we dared in order to keep everything running with the fewest possible interruptions. It never worked as well as we hoped, though. We always had to keep the engines powered or the ship would have been torn apart by dust. So we were constantly herded into smaller and smaller portions of the ship, whatever the rest of our power and recycling systems could maintain."
"So how many of you are left?" Lieutenant Ellis asked. Then he looked down at his feet, "Er…"
But Rokden did not seem offended. "Twenty four million," he said. "It is still much more than we left with. And we have sufficient energy now that we are not travelling. But the other systems are still breaking down. The oxygen reclamation machines in another of our large habitats failed just an hour before you arrived." He paused for a moment, "Elder Morh was embarrassed and irritated because it meant the crowd you saw was larger than anticipated. But such sudden unforeseen hardships have become common for us during the past centuries. I am not ashamed to explain our situation to you, I think it is the only way you could understand."
Pascual's ears perked up. If he wasn't mistaken, Rokden was uncertain that he should have said anything he just had, and was looking for validation. It was such an endearingly Human emotional reaction that Pascual had to fight the urge to smile.
"I appreciate the explanation, Elder," he said, and wondered if the Tadpoles understood enough about inflection for his voice to actually have the soothing effect he wanted. "Thank you. And I do believe I understand your plight a little better. It's not the sort of situation many of us have ever imagined, much less experienced personally. You must have… well, I'll say that I think you ought to at least feel proud that you have survived despite the obstacles you faced. And I'm proud that we can help you to overcome this last one."
For a long while, no one said anything. Pascual watched Rokden's Enharg slowly contract until it looked like the back half of his skull and torso had vanished. Then the Tadpole Elder bowed his head in a single, deliberate nod.
"Thank you. Many of us have wondered if Humans could understand… emotions, in the same way that we do, since you lack the senses to share them directly. But I think that you do. Proud is a good word. That is what I feel."
* * *
"Fly away, little ones," Casey Rukavina said to no one in particular. On his dimmed monitor, a clock counted its way down to zero and began to flash. Although he could not hear the sound, he knew that the seals of 117 cylinders of cooled helium gas had just been opened to space.
Casey shut off the display and closed his eyes. He imagined that he was in the center of a globe of fireflies. He waved his arms and the little cloud of brilliant creatures started and zoomed away while he laughed.