CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
“It’s not enough to get the Neshili out,” François said. “If we free them, they’ll just be pursued and captured again. We have to stop the pursuit.”
Marty felt the weight of that point, and also the counterpoint, which he made. “Obviously, the answer isn’t to kill the Edu, either.”
The party sat in Yotto’s laboratory, scattered around on stools or sitting on the floor. Surjan stood at a window, watching outside. The engineer, Gollip, and several other like-minded Grays sat among them.
“That’s appreciated,” Yotto said.
“We want peace, too,” Marty said.
“I will die if I must,” Yotto said. “For the errors of my people, it is likely some of us will have to die. But I would prefer not to kill.”
“Are all the Herder warriors?” Surjan asked. “Is the Herder party basically your military caste?”
“Not quite,” Yotto said, “but that’s not a terrible way to think about it. It’s mostly the case.”
“And are they all back now?” he continued. “Are they inside the city boundaries?”
Yotto looked to another Gray, one of the ones Marty didn’t recognize. “Spazut?”
“Almost all,” Spazut confirmed. “There are always a few scouts out, and the odd warden patrolling near the gate. But if a thousand Shnipara were to leave the gate together, even unarmed, there aren’t enough Edu outside the city right now to pose them a significant threat.”
“Are there other ways in and out of the city?” Lowanna asked.
“One can climb the ice and cross the glacier,” Gollip said. “It is an extremely rigorous, dangerous, and slow journey. A single person or a small group of determined persons might make that journey, but the entire human population would be foolish to attempt it. Nor would Pinosh and his warriors use that route to pursue fleeing humans.”
“Don’t rule humans out,” François said. “We have three great evolutionary advantages, and one of them is what the English would call sheer bloody-mindedness.”
“What is an English?” Yotto asked.
“He means we can be stubborn,” Lowanna said. “Curious what you think our other two advantages are, Garnier.”
“Our ingenuity, of course.” François smiled as if he were accepting an award. “Other Earth species use tools, but we are innovative to an extraordinary degree.”
“A very François Garnier answer,” Lowanna said.
“And our altruism,” Marty guessed.
François shook his head. “Our hypersexual nature. We are compelled to breed.”
“Come for the escape planning,” Marty said, “stay for the lecture on human reproduction.”
“So, we’re worried about pursuit,” Surjan said. “We should smuggle them out at night. And then we can hold the tunnel ourselves.”
“We’d need to hold it for a long time,” Gunther said. “Unless there are ships the Neshili can use to sail away, they’d need to put enough ground between themselves and the Edu that they couldn’t just be caught again.”
Lowanna shook her head. “Do we really solve anything this way? This is like freeing one lamb from the lion while knowing he’s just going to turn around and catch another lamb the minute our backs are turned.”
“Yes,” François said, “but this is the lamb I know.”
“And the lion I hate,” Kareem added.
An awkward pause followed.
“The ultimate solution is to teach the lamb and the lion to lie down together,” Marty said. “But there’s a reason that the Bible promises that will happen in the end-times, after God comes and fixes things. Because in day-to-day life, it never happens.”
“Technically, Isaiah says the wolf will dwell with the lamb. The young lion dwells with the calf and the fatling.” Gunther shrugged. “We read the Bible in my house when I was a kid. The lion and the lamb are a later poetic summary. I assume for the alliteration in English.”
“Well played.” Marty laughed. “My grandpa Simcha is rolling over in his grave now in embarrassment.”
“Your grandpa Simcha has plenty to be proud of,” Lowanna said.
Marty felt himself blushing.
“We could hold the gate a long time,” Surjan said. “We could light a big fire in it and then just tend the fire.”
“That creates a different problem for us,” Marty said. “It puts us on the other side of a big fire from the portal we want to use.”
“There’s an easy solution to that,” Gunther said. “We sail back to Nesha and take that portal.”
“Fight one whole city of civilized Grays, sail halfway around the world, enter a palace of savage, man-eating Grays—probably totally flooded by now, so François will be using his ingenuity to make SCUBA gear for us out of coconut shells—and take the portal we’re pretty sure exists because Kareem saw it.” Lowanna shook her head. “I like the easy solutions.”
“I know what I saw,” Kareem said.
“She isn’t doubting you,” François said.
“You will not have to fight one whole city of civilized Edu,” Gollip said. “We will fight with you.”
“Thank you,” Marty said. “Let’s think about that carefully, though. It may be that you can give us the biggest help with intelligence and planning, and then get out of the way so as not to put yourselves at risk.”
“There is a dungeon,” Kareem said. “We free the humans from it and we put the Herders in.” He blinked and then looked at his feet.
“This might be the sabre-tooth and the alpaca solution,” Yotto said. “We would then teach our fellows to be more peaceful. Perhaps, receiving the instruction in prison, they might be more amenable to it.”
“We would have to repair the food production equipment very quickly,” François mused.
“Immediately,” Yotto agreed.
“If we’re going to have to immediately repair the machinery, though,” François continued, “maybe there’s another machine that would let us defeat the Herders. Maybe we can use the air circulation machines to fill the city full of some gas that would knock all the Edu out. Then we could imprison the Herders while they were unconscious. It would be a bloodless solution.”
“We could deprive the entire city of oxygen,” Yotto agreed slowly. “That would only give you a few minutes of unconsciousness in which to act. But I think you also breathe oxygen, in any case.”
“Gunther?” François asked. “Lowanna? Any help?”
“Do you mean, do I know anything in my bag of tricks that will let you go without breathing?” Lowanna asked. “I think so, if you can submerge yourself in water. But I’m not sure if it works on just me or on other people. That’s something we could test. But even if I could figure something out for two people, what then? Marty and Surjan dunk themselves in a tank and breathe water while everyone else gets knocked out because we turn off the air? Then Surjan and Marty come back out, turn the air back on, and they have a couple of minutes to put all the Herders into prison? Which can only be, what, many hundreds or more of them, right, Yotto?”
“Okay, so that’s not a complete plan,” François agreed. “But it has some workable elements.”
“Are the Herders all in one part of the city?” Surjan asked. “Maybe we could tamper with the water to knock them out.”
“The Herders who are sitting in the old prisons watching the prisoners are right on top of the central flows,” Yotto said. “We couldn’t get to their water without affecting everyone’s. And we’d need a huge amount of that drug, whatever it was. And we’d need to draw off water for ourselves and our allies first, so we retain consciousness and can act once the Herders pass out.”
“I’m seeing some challenges here, too,” François murmured.
“Not to mention,” Gollip added, “that if it’s the water that is drugged and not the air, they’ll drink water at different times. And once a few of them start falling unconscious, others are likely to try to figure out what’s happening to them, and some of them will realize that the water has been tampered with.”
“Hmm,” François said.
“Also,” Yotto said, “any solution that depends on using or altering the city’s core machinery will require us to implement it right under the noses of the largest concentration of Herder warriors, there at the prison.”
Lowanna held her temples as if she suffered from a headache.
Yotto rested his pointy chin in his hands. “If the Herders realize we have helped you, there will be reprisals. A machinery solution will give us away. I am prepared to pay that price, but we should be realistic about it.”
“I’m not prepared for that,” Marty said.
“Saving the Neshili is more important than saving ourselves,” Gunther said. “I’m prepared to pay the price.”
“So am I,” Marty said. “But I’m trying not to inflict the price on other people.”
“We repair the food machinery, as discussed,” François said. “We sneak the Neshili out. Then we blow up the magma tube.”
“You’ll interrupt the work of providing medical help to the Shnipara,” Gollip pointed out.
“And save a thousand lives,” Lowanna said.
“How long will it take to fix the food machinery, though?” Marty asked. “You say it like you’re the Fonz and you’re just going to kick the Coke machine so it spits out a bottle, but in fact you haven’t diagnosed what the problem is.”
“Or problems, plural,” Surjan pointed out.
“And how many humans will get eaten while we wait for you to kick the Coke machine again and again?” Gunther added.
“Could we provide some sort of animal substitutes?” Marty asked. “What if we offered to go gather a herd of . . . I don’t know, alpacas?”
“The ram in the thicket,” Gunther said. “I approve.”
“It can’t work,” Lowanna said. “Remember the Sethians in Egypt. They didn’t solve their problem by just going out and eating goats’ livers. There’s something about human livers that accumulates the iron better or is easier for off-worlders to metabolize.”
“The Hathiru made some kind of bean pottage that seemed to do the trick,” Marty remembered.
“Should have asked them for their recipe when you had the chance,” Lowanna said.
“It’s true,” Gollip said, “human livers seem exceptionally well-suited to carrying and delivering the nutrients we need.”
“Which is why you call us ‘cattle.’” Kareem scowled.
“I did not make up the word,” Gollip said. “And I apologize for ever using it. I will only call you ‘humans’ from now on.”
Kareem’s scowled deepened.
“What is the portal?” Yotto asked. “It is inside the vessel, I understand that. But what do you need it for? In all my tinkering with the controls of the vessel, I have never been able to make it activate.”
“The problem is not just to activate it,” Gunther said. “The problem is also to direct it.”
“It’s how we get out of here,” Marty said. “I think . . .” He considered. “I think the ten numbered locations on the vessel’s map, the City of the Gods on Earth and her nine daughters, are connected in a chain through portals. So we’re in portal number seven, though we’re not really supposed to be here, because out of sheer stubbornness we deviated from the path. We started the path at one, as we were supposed to, and instead of . . . accomplishing our assigned quest, I suppose . . . and then going to location two, we marched across a continent, fought a war that wasn’t assigned to us, and then jumped to number five. From number five, we sailed to number seven. So going through that portal should take us to number eight, which is . . .” Marty had an image of the map in his mind’s eye and frowned. “Am I misremembering or did eight show up in the middle of the Indian ocean, halfway between Australia and Madagascar?”
Surjan nodded. “That’s what I recall, which seems a bit strange.”
“Ah, wait a minute.” François lifted his index finger, his eyes wide. “The map shows us locations, but remember, we’re dealing with a factor of time. Portal number one landed us in the time of Narmer, but coming to number five rewound the clock thousands of years. For all we know, we might go very far in the past or future with any of these hops. Maybe we’re not meant to come here the way we did and we’re actually very late, which to be honest, wouldn’t surprise me. It seems like some things happened long ago in this place that probably shouldn’t have happened.”
Marty cringed. “You know, that actually sounds right. Who knows what portal number eight would do, but the idea of landing in the middle of the ocean doesn’t thrill me.”
“It could be millions of years from when we are right now,” Lowanna suggested. “Continents drift over that kind of timeframe. Maybe our next stop is fighting dinosaurs.”
Marty shook his head. “We’re off the trail, anyway. But the only way we know to get forward—and possibly home, if that’s the goal—is to try to get back on the road somehow.”
“Bloody-mindedness at its best,” François said. “We won’t cooperate with this test or game or whatever it is. I say we bang on this portal until we get what we want out of it.”
“That does feel rather English,” Surjan said.
Yotto cocked his head to one side. “You use the metaphor of a game. Let’s define our winning conditions. One, the captive humans finish the game outside the city. Two, pursuit is hampered sufficiently so that they can escape. That likely means that pursuit must be delayed weeks, but certainly several days. Three, you have access to the portal afterward.”
“Four,” Marty said, “as few people as possible—of all species—are harmed.”
“And are those four winning conditions all essential?” Gollip asked. “Or what is the order of their priority?”
Yotto waved the question away with a dismissive hand. “The plan we must implement is obvious. We free the humans, send them out the magma tube, and collapse the tube. With you six inside the city, of course.”
“We condemn you all to sickness and slow death,” Marty said.
“No,” François countered. “We send the Neshili out and destroy the gate. The Herders will have to negotiate. We’ll offer to stick around and fix the machinery. It would take them way too long to send parties over the ice to chase after the escaping humans, so they’ll have no choice.”
“They’ll have a choice,” Surjan said. “They could choose to eat the six of us, then murder all the Farmers to conserve supplies while they establish their routes over the glacier.”
“That would be a tragic outcome,” Gollip agreed. “But the Neshili would get away.”
“But you’re right,” Yotto agreed. “Pinosh would want revenge. Visible justice to reinforce his power. So we shouldn’t give him the opportunity. We send out the humans, collapse the gate, and send you through the portal. Fixing the machines was my problem before you arrived, and it will continue to be my problem afterward.”
“Pinosh might exact his revenge on you,” Marty said.
Yotto shrugged. “This is my home, and I was always going to live or die here one way or another.”
“You say we should collapse the tunnel,” Marty said. “Is there a machine that does that?”
Gollip bobbled his head.
Yotto nodded. “There is such a machine. We call it a bomb.”
“Oh, good,” Marty said. “François loves bombs.”
“This bomb is held as a defense of last resort,” Yotto said. “When we first crashed and lost all communications, we weren’t sure what we’d be facing, so some of us took defensive measures and devised this type of defense. It’s intended precisely to close the tunnel, in the event that the city is threatened by an overwhelming enemy outside the gate. The bomb is not located in the tunnel, but it’s in a location from which it can easily be carried to the tunnel. Probably.”
“Probably?” Lowanna asked.
Surjan folded his arms across his chest. “Sounds perfect.”
“The only problem,” Yotto said, “is that it is in the possession of Pinosh and his Herders.”
Kareem punched one fist into his other palm. “That’s not a problem.”