Final Inquiries (23 page)

"That's not like the Vixa," Jamie protested.

"It isn't?" Zhen Chi gestured at the blue sky above, the garden by the embassy, the world all around. The breeze blew a few strands of hair into her eyes and she brushed them away. "Aside from cops and security types, have you seen one Vixa outside, not in a vehicle or a structure, but outside, exposed to the sky and the wind and the air, since you got here?"

"Well, now that you mention it, no. But I've seen diplomats, trade representatives, even Vixan police investigators on human worlds. I've talked to them. They went outside. Sometimes." Thinking back on it, Jamie realized the Vixa he had met did seem to find a lot of reasons to stay inside.

"If they were outside, I promise they didn't enjoy it," said Zhen Chi. "There are worker castes and soldier-police castes and so on modified to tolerate exposure to the outside, but that's considered very low-class behavior. And I promise you, as certain as I'm sitting here with you, that those diplomats and representatives and investigators were specially bred--no, more than that, specially
engineered
from prebred stock, then specially raised and indoctrinated for the job they were doing. And, my guess would be, they were heavily medicated at all times. Remember what I said about the medical castes having injectable meds in their stingers? Some of our more excessively imaginative intell types think that the Vixa bred and engineered for off-planet work have their stinger glands modified to provide various tranquilizers for self-injection!

"Believe me, one of the things that the Vixa sneer at us for is that we
like
to go outside--and they think the concept of privacy is a downright deviation. And I can bet you whatever you like that you never saw a Vixa alone--"

"SubPilot Greveltra! The one who flew us here!"

"I was about to say,
except
for a spacecraft pilot or subpilot. They're crazy already so it doesn't matter. And I think they're crazy
because
they are bred and engineered to be alone. Every other caste or breed of Vixa actively needs company. At least one companion, preferably dozens. That's probably where a lot of the escort tradition came from. Aside from the pilot castes, my rough measure is that an hour or so alone for a Vixa is like a month in solitary confinement for us."

"What about the simulants?" Jamie asked. "My sim was alone with us for a while."

"They need to do that for imprinting, I think. There's a lot of guesswork. The simulants are new to us, and we know almost nothing about them. But I'd bet a week's pay that as soon as your simulant had the chance, it linked up with a Vixa or another simulant--and, if it had the chance, it stayed away from the SubPilot."

"Well, yeah. You're right."

"My guess--and it's just a guess--is that they regard space travel as such a high-risk profession that they design the whole system to expose as few Vixa as possible to it. Not for the sake of the individual's safety. That wouldn't matter so much. But to limit contamination. Exposure. To keep from having to contemplate sending ten or twenty Vixa, or a whole subhive, some socially significant grouping, outside the group. It's a very disturbing idea to them. Risking one SubPilot would be like risking a fingernail. Not a much bigger deal than expending a simulant. But ten or twenty six-limbers, or even nine-limbers--a
group
of connected, related, individuals is something very different. That is perceived as a significant part of the whole."

"But if there's a hive mentality, why should the hive care about individuals?"

"They--it, the hive--doesn't care about individuals. It's fear. Like giving someone a chance to chop off your hand, or poke your eye out. Plus, maybe, that chopped-off hand could grow itself a new body--and then come looking for you."

"Huh?"

"In theory, at least, a large enough group could be the nucleus, the starting point for a new hive that would compete with the old one. So the old hive not only doesn't
want
a large number of its members to die--it also doesn't want them cut off, given a chance to escape and grow on their own."

"But how could they form a new hive if they're all sterile?"

"In honey bees, if the queen lays an unfertilized egg, that egg still grows into a bee--a male, a drone. That drone could then mate with the queen and fertilize her eggs, so they would grow into worker bees. Feed one of those workers royal jelly long enough, and it will grow into a queen who might be able to start her own hive--but she'd be the descendent of a drone hatched from an unfertilized egg. We don't know the details of Vixan biology very well at all, and I'm sure it doesn't work quite that way--but if bees can reproduce without a queen, why not Vixa? Besides, bees don't have labs and test tubes and gene sequencers and cloning labs--but Vixa do. And maybe they aren't so good at doing biology or genetics on anybody
else,
but believe me, the Vixa are good at working with their
own
genetic material. Any group of twenty or forty or so Vixa that included a few six-limbers could be presumed to have the capability of forming a new hive."

"And they've used that same skill at genetics to breed themselves some castes for use as snacks?"

Zhen Chi frowned. "Possibly. We don't know. More than likely, those helpers you saw eaten were developed from some naturally occurring nonsentient caste. The same with the other slave castes--the escorts, the laborers, and so forth."

"So you'd go ahead and use the word 'slave.'"

"Slavery is wrong for humans because it means taking people as sentient as you are and treating them like animals. Most people have no problem with making a horse or a dog or a camel work, but there
are
some people who say it's wrong. You're forcing the animal to work, and breeding away its desire for freedom."

"Dogs and horses aren't slaves," Jamie said stubbornly.

"Why not? Forced to work, no pay, no freedom--and deliberately bred for the work, to boot. How do they not fit the definition?"

"I don't know. I haven't thought about it a lot."

"The Vixa modified their equivalents of dogs and horses and cows, and used
them
as the raw materials to make new species, new subordinate biocastes. They breed
them
for work--or for food. Not so different than what humans do. We think--or at least hope--the Vixa don't modify themselves into born slaves."

"It still freaks me out. What I saw is going to give me bad dreams for a long time."

"Pretty much everyone at this embassy has those dreams," Zhen Chi said quietly. "Just being on the same planet with the Vixa forces us to ask a lot of uncomfortable questions. But in the available universe, we have no choice but to deal with the Vixa."

"There you are!" called a voice from a short way off.

Jamie looked up. It was Hannah. "I've been looking for you," she said as she walked up. "Good morning, Zhen Chi."

"Good morning."

"Anything going on?" Hannah asked.

"Just getting a quick biology lesson," said Jamie.

"Well, class is over for now. Come on. We've got a lot to do."

Jamie stood up and turned to Zhen Chi. "Thanks," he said. "I think that helped. At least I hope so."

"Me too," she said gravely. "But fair warning--nothing does, very much. Nothing will, as long as the Vixa are the Vixa."

TWELVE

CAFFEINATED SOCIOLOGY

Hannah and Jamie found the canteen without much trouble. It was the utilitarian building with the excessively cheerful, brightly colored handmade sign reading SNACK SHACK. Just by virtue of being one of the very few splashes of cheerful color, the sign served as a reminder that everything around it was government-issue beige, utilitarian, and serious. Hannah made the private observation that officially mandated morale-raising efforts at fun and informality never did work very well.

She flatly vetoed Jamie's suggestion that they conserve their own mealpacks and make use of embassy supplies. Food became very important in a small, remote post. Hannah knew that rummaging around in the supplies could throw off the menu planning for the week, or even the year. They might accidentally gorge on the one item that was in short supply, or blunder into some existing feud about what food belonged to whom--or worst of all, touch off a
new
feud that would set the two of them against the embassy staff.

But that didn't mean they couldn't eat their own food there. Even long-store meals just tasted better eaten off a real plate with a real knife and fork. Therefore they satisfied themselves with borrowing plates, forks, utensils, and so forth--being
very
careful to clean up after themselves. But no matter how careful they were, they were plainly intruding on a very small club, run on a very personal basis. Hannah could see that, in a dozen little details of arrangement.

Hannah was starting to get some ideas about how they might make use of what the Snack Shack was telling her. She left Jamie to rustle up whatever sort of meal he could from their own mealpacks while she took a look around the interior of the small canteen. It wasn't a large place, and she had seen similar layouts in any number of remote posts where people tended to stay on base a lot for whatever reason.

There was a cooking area with stoves, ovens, freezers, refrigerators, and the like along the back wall, and an auto dishwasher in the right rear corner. A serving line ran down the center of the room, and the front half of the place was taken up with just enough seating for everyone at the embassy to squeeze in at once.

There was an accordion-pleated flexible folding partition that could be drawn across the room, dividing it in two, and thus turning the right-hand side into a private dining room that could be reached from the outside from its own door.

In the front left-hand corner of the lunchroom were two large coffee urns, marked with official-looking stick-on signs marked REGULAR and DECAFFEINATED.

Hanging on a pair of chains from the ceiling above was another sign, also quite official in appearance.

ALL EMPLOYEES WITH KENDARI CONTACTS MUST
OBEY CAFFEINE SAFETY PROTOCOLS AT ALL TIMES.

A typed note on embassy stationery was taped to that sign. The paper looked like it had been there a while. It had browned a little at the edges, and dried splashes of what could only be coffee marked the lower right-hand corner. It was all in capital letters, and read:

REMINDER, PEOPLE--CAFFEINE SAFETY PROTS

EXTEND TO ALL UNUSED REG & DECAF COFFEE

GROUNDS, USED COFFEE GROUNDS, USED AND

UNUSED LOOSE TEA, TEABAGS (INCLUDING

HERBAL--BETTER SAFE THAN SORRY) ALL OTHER

CAFFEINATED BEVERAGES, ALL DECAF VERSIONS

OF CAFFEINATED PRODUCTS,
AND ALL

CONTAINERS THAT DO OR EVER DID HOLD THE

ABOVE OBJECTS!!!

Dr. Zhen Chi, Med. Off.

The ink scribble over Zhen Chi's typed name had to be her signature, but Hannah couldn't make out a single legible letter in it. Hannah had long ago observed that the stereotype about doctors and their handwriting was far better deserved than most.

A final, smaller, handwritten note in neat block letters was taped to the other corner of the ALL EMPLOYEES sign. It was newer-looking, and cleaner.

PLEASE REMEMBER TO WASH, NOT JUST RINSE,

MUGS BEFORE RETURNING THEM TO RACK.

THANKS!

SNACK SHACK STAFF

And, there, on the wall to the left of the coffee urns, were two sets of open shelves just deep enough to hold a single row of cups or glasses. The first shelf was filled with about thirty identical standard UniGov-issue coffee cups, each on its own saucer.

The second set of shelves was plainly someone's well-intentioned but doomed effort to organize everyone's personal cups and mugs. There were neat little labels under each section of shelf, each with a person's name or title. There were about twenty of the labels. Most, but not all, had cups or mugs parked in their assigned spots. They were of all sorts--insulated mugs with lids, handmade ceramic ones purchased at this or that crafts fair at some previous posting, others with the logos of businesses or government departments, and a few with jokes or sayings. One showed a cartoon of a bureaucrat dozing at his desk over the caption
Visit Fabulous Center--The Capital Planet on the Edge.
Hannah was pretty sure she knew what gift shop that had come from.

One bothersome fact was that no fewer than four of the mugs had the BSI logo--one of these was dark blue, but three were white, and identical to the one found at the crime scene. She checked the white ones, and found that all of them had names written on the bottom in black marker that looked to be quite recent. It looked as if the same person had written in all the names, but she couldn't be quite sure the handwriting was identical, judging only from lettering scribbled on the bottom of cups.

She skimmed her eye over some of the other labels.
Groppe, Lindermann, Bonkofski, Mtombe, Smith, DCM
--that had to mean Deputy Chief of Mission, the officer second-in-command under the ambassador--
Halloran, Med. Off., Singh, Farrell,
and, inevitably, one just labeled
The Ambassador.

Stabmacher's cup wasn't in either of the spots one might choose as the highest-status spot, either first in line at the top, or in the center of the center row. It was instead democratically positioned off to one side of the second row. It was deep red, with the UniGov Diplomatic Corps logo printed on it. There was just the faintest film of undisturbed dust on its rim and handle, and around the base of the cup, making it clear that that cup was never used, or moved.

The bottom row and a half of shelves gave mute and eloquent testimony to the limits of organization. Two labels had been peeled off incompletely, but cups still sat over where the labels had been. On another label, the original name had simply been scribbled over, and the words
Fred's Cup
awkwardly written in underneath.

Down in the corner was one marked
Linda
in an aggressively cheerful, youthful-looking handwriting that was almost elaborate enough to be called calligraphy. The cup over it was blue and gold, and looked to have some sort of college crest emblazoned on it. It looked brand-new.