The Crucible of Empire (50 page)

That evening, once they had returned to Jaolore, Caitlin decided to level with Jihan. The truth had to come out, especially if they were going to transport these people back to Earth. The Lleix needed to know the situation before they got on the ships, not after. That would only make things worse.

She knew now that Jaolore was indeed very small, consisting of only three full-fledged members, Jihan, Pyr, and a sturdy male named Kajin. The latter spent a lot of time oiling his skin and avoided humans and Jao whenever possible, always leaving a room if any of them entered. A few white-clad permanent servants, as opposed to gray-clad unassigned, worked in the house too, but they never spoke in her presence, not even in the local dialect.

She padded through from room to room, seeking Jihan in the kitchen, the sleeping quarters, the front hall, finally finding her with Kajin in an officelike chamber with viewing machines and stacks of flat recordings. Both were seated on tall stools before screens, studying old files. Kajin gave her a smoldering look and bolted through the closest door.

Caitlin sighed. Obviously, humans were not universally popular around here. "Are you too busy to talk right now?" she asked Jihan.

"No, no," Jihan said. "I practice Jao to speak better."

She already had an amazing command of the language for someone who had only been studying it for weeks, not years. As nearly as Caitlin could tell, though, Jihan had no concept of the vast Jao vocabulary of postures.

"I have something to tell you," Caitlin said, climbing up on the stool next to Jihan and clasping her hands.

"Yes, yes?" the Lleix said, corona standing at attention.

Her heart raced. Damn Wrot and Kaln for putting her in such a position! None of this mess was her lamebrained idea.
They
should have been the ones who had to fess up and make amends, if such a bungled first contact could ever be made right.

"We have not told you the truth about the situation between the humans and the Jao," she said slowly.

Jihan's black, black eyes narrowed.

Jihan waited. Caitlin was so short, the human made Jihan think of her last season in the Children's Court when she had been assigned to instruct the youngers. She gazed down at the round little head with some of the tenderness it was appropriate to feel for youthful creatures weak and small.

"We never conquered the Jao," Caitlin said. The words were spoken slowly with apparent reluctance. The human's tiny fingers were interlaced, one hand gripping the other. "They are not our slaves. They discovered our solar system and then conquered Terra."

Conquered? Perhaps, Jihan thought, she was not understanding the words correctly. After all, she was still learning Jao. Perplexed, she shifted her weight on the stool so that it creaked. "But you are Queen of the Universe."

"No," Caitlin said softly, "I am not." Her strangely colored eyes looked aside as though she were ashamed. "My father is a leader among the humans, but though I work for the government of Terra, I have no actual rank."

The words piled up, creating a terrible picture, if Jihan truly comprehended what Caitlin was saying. Certainly, she had no idea what the term "father" meant. Her aureole wilted against her skull and the
elian
-house seemed unnaturally hushed. A cold frisson of dread shivered through her. "I—do not understand."

"Over twenty orbital periods ago," Caitlin said, still not meeting her gaze, "heavily armed Jao ships entered Terra's solar system. Humans fought a great war against them, but the Jao won."

Jihan's mind reeled. She could not breathe. "Then humans are Jao slaves?"

"No." Caitlin bowed her head. "Not slaves, but for a very long time they did rule us. It was—an unpleasant situation."

"But the Jao said this thing-that-is-not-true to me," Jihan said. "It said you are 'Queen of the Universe'—why would it do that?"

"That particular Jao suffered a head injury in the recent battle inside this star system against the Ekhat," Caitlin said. "Her behavior has been erratic ever since. I believe she genuinely thought she was being funny."

"I do not know that word—funny." Jihan's mind continued to spin. She felt utterly lost. Such a great error! How could she have ever let herself be so misled? "It is not in the records."

"No, it would not be." Caitlin appeared to think, staring down at the burnished wooden floor, tapping her booted foot. "I do not know how to explain it," she said finally. "Both Jao and humans think some situations are amusing, but usually not the same things. Whatever seems funny to the Lleix probably would not to us either."

"The Jao rule humans now?" Jihan said. A great trembling seized her, and she remembered the face of the brave Eldest who had faced the Jao so long ago and been brutally cut down. The Jao had not changed over the years into beneficent rescuers. They were simply more duplicitous than Jihan had ever realized.

"Not—exactly," Caitlin said. "We have come to an understanding which makes us equal. We work with one another now."

Another word she did not understand—"equal." This was bad. The situation was spinning out of control like a damaged ship whose controls no longer answered the helm. Jihan could not begin to think how such a crucial misunderstanding was to be explained to the Han, who could not even make up their collective minds to accept help from humans they believed to be conquerors of their old enemy. That Jao, back at the Ekhat derelict, had lied to her for its own sly reasons, and the humans, including Caitlin, had allowed it to do so.

"If the Jao who told this untruth was injured, why did you let it continue?" Jihan said, turning her head away.

"I did not want to," Caitlin said. "I thought it was a mistake, a great discourtesy, but the Lleix have long feared the Jao, with good reason. Wrot, the Jao who is senior to me, thought you would not be afraid to accept our help if we let you go on believing Jao were human slaves, at least until you knew them better."

Jihan felt her tension ease somewhat. It was true that all the Jao who had accompanied them back to Valeron had behaved well, even the crazy one with the droopy ear who had set this unfortunate situation into motion. So far she had not seen the least sign of aggression from any of them. The great ship
Lexington
could have obliterated their colony between one breath and the next, had this strange Jao-human coalition so desired. She had not the slightest doubt about that.

"I believe the only way for the Lleix to survive is to flee this world and come to Earth, at least for a while," Caitlin said. "I cannot promise this will be done until the
Lexington
returns after seeking the counsel of our rulers, both human and Jao. But if they agree with me, the Lleix must be ready to go."

And to do that, they would have to trust these aliens, who had just revealed they could not be trusted. In her distress, Jihan's arm accidently knocked a stack of recording flats to the floor. She stared down at the chaos, unable in her woeful shortness to think what to do.

Tully appropriated the second house and placed the third under the command of Lieutenant Miller. Mallu was left in charge of the jinau and Krants posted at Jaolore. Both abandoned residences were filthy, with gaping holes in the roofs and infested with several species of vermin. The creatures resembling tiny blue mouse-hoppers were particularly destructive, chewing on wood, fabric, and leather, and even a substance that reminded him of plastic, apparently able to digest everything but stone.

At dawn the next day, he set his troops to repair and clean the premises. The wind was still blasting down from the mountains and the skies were lowering gray lead. The work would both warm his soldiers up and keep them busy, and he thought their industriousness would look good to the locals too. Just sitting around, waiting for the
Lexington
to return, cleaning their guns and looking menacing, might convey the wrong message. The Jao had already torn their pants, so to speak, with these folks. No point in making the situation even worse.

The slender Jaolore, Pyr, arrived just after sunrise followed by twelve Lleix of varying heights, all wearing the gray shifts of unassigned. They bunched outside the front doors, breath frosting in the air, gazing at the dilapidated house with what Tully interpreted as something akin to hunger.

"These being servants," Pyr said in mangled Jao when Tully poked his nose out the door to see what the Lleix wanted. "Work very hard. Tell me what you wish, they do."

"Thanks, but we can take care of things ourselves," Tully said, edging beyond the door while shoving his hands into his pockets for warmth. His ears immediately went numb and he shivered. Damn, but it was cold!

"No, no, letting servants do!" Pyr seemed distressed, hopping from one foot to the other. His robe, brocaded with the figures of snarling Jao, fell open, and he hastily pulled it closed. "No let, making them most sad!"

Tully remembered the
dochaya
with its hopeless sea of silver faces. They wanted to work. Employment meant something to them, far more than it would have to a human under similar circumstances. "All right," he said. "They can at least help. We need to clean the house, get rid of the little hopper-things that are chewing the place down, repair the roof, and see what we can do about some furniture."

Pyr turned back to the waiting servants and warbled a string of apparent instructions. Without a word in answer, half of them sidled around Tully and disappeared into the house.

"Taking these now to other human house," Pyr said. "Back soon." He set off down the path to the street with that great reaching stride humans found it difficult to match. The remaining six trailed after him single-file like obedient ducklings.

Tully darted back inside, shivering, his nose already half-frozen. The chamber just beyond the entrance was large and roomy—and utterly frigid. Lleix didn't seem to have developed the concept of central heating, which wasn't a big surprise since they all went about lightly clad as well as barefoot. Upon searching the house, the jinau had found a few small braziers scattered through the various rooms, but they were empty of fuel. Even though the Lleix were going to flee this world, the old fuss-budgets that ruled this place would probably object to his troops chopping down a few of the elaborately pruned trees that studded the gardens.

The temperature would rise some, now that it was day, but from the look of those clouds, it could very well snow. He sighed. Having grown up in the Resistance camps in the Rockies, he knew only too well what it was like to be cold all the time.

The door opened and Caitlin hurried inside, followed by Sergeant Debra Fligor and Mallu. Her cheeks were pink with wind-burn, her blond hair jumbled. "How's it going?" she asked, huddling into her coat and watching as a servant swept the room.

"Not bad, if you like living inside a freezer," Tully said. "I think it's colder in here than outside!"

"I wouldn't be surprised." She looked around the debris-cluttered chamber. "Have you got anywhere we can sit and talk?"

"There's some beat-up benches in the back in what I think might have been a kitchen." He led Caitlin through a series of rooms, some littered with dried blue leaves that had blown in through the holes in the roof, others dusty and choked with the detritus of some past Lleix life.

She followed, leaving Mallu and Fligor behind. "I told Jihan last night," she said quietly, settling on one of the benches when they got to the silent kitchen area. She shrugged out of her coat and laid it across her lap.

"You told her what?" He sat across from her. She combed her wind-tossed hair with her fingers. Her clothes were rumpled and she looked tired, he thought, like she hadn't slept well in days.

"Everything," she said, "or at least as much of it as I thought she could understand."

The back of his neck prickled. "You told her about the Jao?"

She nodded.

"Jesus!" he said. "You might at least have given me some warning so I could tighten up our security! What if they'd all decided to slaughter us in our sleep after that?"

"I'm sorry," she said. "It was a judgment call and the moment seemed right. I just blurted it all out." She rubbed her eyes. "It wasn't easy, Gabe. Jihan was really shocked and the lie makes us look bad. I think the truth would have been easier to handle from the beginning."

"Caitlin, Queen of the Universe," he said. "Well, it was nice while it lasted."

"No," she said, "there was nothing 'nice' about it. I lived a lie for most of my life, masquerading as the supposedly pampered daughter of the President of the United States to those around me, when I was really a battered political hostage under constant guard. I'd hoped to have put such deception behind me forever."

"Yeah, sometimes I forget about that," he said. "Sorry."

"It's not your fault," she said. "Wrot made this decision, however it turns out, all on his own. Let's just hope we haven't completely blown our credibility with these people." She hesitated.

"There's more?" he said.