Chess With a Dragon Read online

  “My people have nowhere invested as much time in the garbling of the nature of your species as you deserve—[??] [Despite your odorous appearance, we look forward to eating and enslaving you] [??]—and we apologize if we are garbling presumptuous, of course—but have we been uncareful in explaining the nature of our service here?”

  “No, of course not,” Yake was quick to reassure. “The Dhrooughleem have been extraordinarily helpful to us in our missions. Were it not for the Dhrooughleem, we would not be able to query the Exchange anywhere nearly as efficiently as we have been.”

  “Yes, that is precisely the issue, dear garble.” The Dhrooughleem writhed in its tank, stirring the brackish-looking water into murky brown and green swirls. “We are concerned about your relationship with the Exchange. [Your egg clusters are a lovely shade of ignorance.] Perhaps we do not understand you well enough. Perhaps you do not understand us—”

  “Oh, no—we understand you perfectly!” Yake caught himself in mid-word, and corrected himself hastily: “I mean, we understand you as well as we can. That is, allowing for cultural and biological differences and the inefficiencies of our translating circuits.”

  “Yes, that is the [offspring]! Perhaps, we have failed to garble what your responsibilities are to the membership of the Exchange.”

  Yake cleared his throat uncomfortably. What was the damn slug driving at anyway? This was going to require some fancy tap-dancing. “As I understand it, Mn Dhrooughlorh,” Yake began carefully. “The Exchange is a gathering of many different species from many different worlds. Admission is granted to any species that can maintain a mission here. Is that correct so far?”

  “Unfortunately so. You are aware also of the responsibilities and [fresh excrement] that such membership entails?”

  “Information requested must be paid for with information of equal value—or by services. My species understands the concept of value exchange quite well.”

  “That is the concern and [antique chair collection] of my species. I am relieved to hear you say that. I had so feared that we might be [enamored] about the circumstances, Mr. Browne.”

  Yake was about to reassure the Dhrooughleem again when something went twang in the back of his mind. He said, instead, “As we understand the contract, new species are allowed a period of indebtedness in which to acquaint themselves with the . . . the rules of the game. Have we been mistaken about that?”

  “Again, your grasp of the [slime mold] is admirable, Mr. Browne. It is I who must wear the [seasoning-spices] of embarrassment. Please to accept a thousand and three apologies for even raising the subject. The question was brought up only as a [traffic ornament] of our great respect for your species, and our concern that your [enslavement] be applied most deliciously.”

  “I beg your pardon? What was that about ‘enslavement’?’” (Yake promised himself an appointment with the Chief of Translation Services. This was intolerable!)

  The slug burbled a blue froth. “[I have exercised my hair.] What word didn’t you understand?”

  “The word for ‘service,’ I believe.”

  The slug blew a single red bubble. A bad sign that. The translator whispered: “I said nothing about service.”

  Yake sighed and retreated into the safest of rituals. “Pardon my ignorance, Mn Dhrooughlorh, but I am confused here. I abase myself at my own stupidity. Please do not feel that the misunderstanding is a result of any of your words or actions. Please accept my apology for any inference that you have done less than your best. Perhaps in my eagerness to ease your discomfort at having to travel meet in such a cumbersome device as a tank on wheels, I presume familiarities that I should not.”

  Yake reached up and twiddled his hair with his fingers; the closest he could come to an abasement wriggle. He felt like Stan Laurel doing it; then, having satisfied the ritual, he continued carefully, “Somehow I get the feeling that there is a subject we are discussing about which I do not have all the facts. May I request that you speak your concern a bit more directly? I promise you that there can be no offense taken here. We are searching only for the clarity of truth within your information.”

  “Since you ask for candor, I can only give it to you.” The slug sank back down in its tank. Its eyes—all eight of them—were suddenly very large and very black. “My species is quite concerned about the size of your information debt.”

  “We have asked for something we should not have?”

  “No, no—it is not the current package of requests that is the issue. It is the extremely large amount of information that you have already [ingested]. The interest is accruing perhaps a bit more rapidly than you are aware? Indeed, at the current rate of accrual, you are going to strike your debt limit in less than eighteen of your months. My species is [be-fargled] that your species will be indentured before you have had an opportunity present a [vat of boiling chemicals] to the Monitors.

  “It is clear to me of course, now that you have reassured me here, that you and your species fully understand the nature of the circumstances and are not without knowledge of the [edibles]—but of course, the cleverness of your species is such that you must already have a [foundation garment] to present to the InterChange, and I have been dreadfully out of line for even garbling the subject. Please, no offense is meant—”

  “—and none is taken.”

  “However, the [garlic seasoning] of this discussion was to let you know that the Dhrooughleem stand ready to continue to assist the Terran Mission in any way possible—”

  “We thank you for that.”

  “—and if your [menu of green flavors] is turned down by the Monitors, we stand ready to assume the indenture of your entire species—”

  “I beg your pardon? It sounded like you said ‘indenture’—”

  “—We have assumed many indentures, and always at the worst equable rate. We would take great [condiments] to be the kindest of guardians while your [enslavement] is [ingested]. You promise to be a most [delicious] species.”

  Yake felt dizzy. The translator hadn’t been out of focus at all! Oh, dear Lord in Heaven!

  “We have hesitated to mention this, of course, out of our fear that we might somehow [gringle] your [pentacles]. To some species, even to imply [malodorous deflation] might be smelled as a [sphincter] of offense. It [tickles our bladders] that you [descendants of tree shrews] are so [happy to be eaten]. Some species would see such a [bereavement] as a [dishonorable suicide]. It is our very high regard for you [things that belong on a plate] that mandates our concern here. If you would pass this [offer of ingestion] on to your own superiors so that they may be aware of our concern and our willingness to purchase your indenture and [eat your livers], we would be most—”

  The rest of the interview was a blur.

  The Teeth of the Slug

  The Crying Room looked like a war zone.

  Every terminal was alive, whether someone was sitting before it or not; every screen was either scrolling through long columns of text or flashing bright-colored three-dimensional graphs and translation matrices. The diplomacy-technicians were moving quickly from work station to work station, pulling reports from one, giving instructions to another, keying in new instructions to a third. The Section Chiefs were clustered in small groups at or near the big briefing table; that end of the hall was raised above the rest so that most of the large screens at the opposite end of the chamber would be visible from that position. The table itself was covered with a six-hour detritus of half-empty coffee mugs, still-glowing clipboards, scratch pads, pens, crumpled wads of paper, and red-bordered hardcopies of classified documents.

  Secretaries of all four sexes moved quietly around the edges of the room, gathering up the debris of previous confrontations and handing out weaponry for the next. Orderlies and robots worked to replenish sandwiches and keep the coffee urns full. In one of the corners, a thirty-year veteran was quietly weeping in a chair.

  The initial shock of realization had not yet sunk in. The diplomatic staff
was still trying to assimilate the scope of the problem. The damage reports were still coming in—and the damage was not only worse than anyone had expected; it was even worse than they had feared.

  The Crisis Management Team was not even waiting for the full report; they had already moved into the second stage of the job—fixing the blame. The sound level was horrendous; the cacophony was on its way to a record decibel level. The accusations, denials, explanations, excuses, justifications, rationalizations and reasons, stormed and raged back and forth across the room like a caged tornado, carrying in its fury a blizzard of notes and images, documents, diagrams, photographs and papers. The conflicting evidences of blame and blamelessness flickered and flashed across the wall of screens until all meaning was leached from even the simplest of facts. The situation assimilation process had long since aborted and collapsed in a state of information implosion.

  The Ambassador From Terra had once been known for his Million Light Year stare. Now his eyes were veiled and gray. His stare was focused on the cold cup of coffee in his hands and it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. A jabber of voices swirled around him, but apparently he was listening to none of them.

  Yake Singh Browne sat quietly at the opposite corner of the table, making meaningless notes on a pad of paper while the arguments continued. He did not even look up when the chair flew past his back. Two career diplomats had already had to be pried apart by their colleagues and sent to opposite corners of the room.

  “Sir? Sir—” someone from Analysis was trying to attract the Ambassador’s attention. Yake glanced across the table and began to wonder if the Ambassador was crumbling under the strain. The Old Man looked dreadful. The Assistant Secretary of Something-Or-Other was jabbering insistently, “I hate to say ‘I told you so,’ but we’ve been advocating fiscal responsibility for decades and no one’s been listening to us. This is precisely the kind of debt position that we’ve been warning against—”

  “It’s really the fault of the Library Department,” said the bulldozer-shaped woman on the other side of the Ambassador. “You know how those hackers are. They see something interesting on the menu; they automatically download it with the idea of exploring it in detail later. Of course, they never do. Something more interesting always comes along. We have material in our banks that we won’t be getting to for a hundred years! And as far as assimilation goes—”

  “Really, I reject that!” came the angry reply from halfway down the table. “If we’d had the help we’d originally asked for, that material wouldn’t be going unread. I say that if we’d had the librarians we could have catalogued the material already.

  There’s probably a hundred different answers to this situation already in our banks. We just don’t know where to find them—”

  “I think you’re all missing the point here. You’ve been played for fools by the Dah—D’haroo—Dhrooughleem.” That was Madja Poparov, the new Policy Supervisor from the InterChange-Council Advisory Committee, Soviet Section. Rumor had it that she could trace her ancestry all the way back to Joseph Stalin. Yake looked up curiously.

  “You have been—what is right word here? Set up? Da. Led by your noses down a primrose garden.”

  “Yes, of course, Ms. Poparov,” Anne Larson, the British Representative, replied with a smile. “Considering your own political background, you would be the one most likely to spot such a situation—”

  “This is not time for accusations and recriminations,” Madja responded quietly. “This is time for thoughtful solutions.”

  “Absolutely,” Larson’s smile grew dangerous. “Let the record show that as soon as Ms. Poparov had read her accusations and recriminations into the record, she was ready to get back to work.”

  Madja’s face reddened. “That is unfair attack. Very nyet kulturny.”

  “No attack is unfair—attacks are supposed to hurt. That’s how the game is played.”

  Yake lowered his face to his notepad, to hide his own smile.

  “Can we please keep to the subject, Ladies—?” interrupted a tired voice. Yake looked up. It was the Ambassador.

  Normally, the Old Man kept out of the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-down-and-dirty part of the discussions until a consensus began to develop. For him to request that the participants of a free-for-all try to stay on purpose demonstrated just how immediate he felt the situation really was.

  Both Larson and Poparov nodded their instant acquiescence—then exchanged withering glares. Yake waited to see if the Ambassador was going to add anything else, but the Old Man lapsed back into silence.

  “Sir?” That was Kasahara from Intelligence. “There may be some evidence to support Ms. Poparov’s assertion that we’ve been set up—”

  Poparov’s glare turned into a triumphant smile.

  “—but I think the truth is much more that we’ve set ourselves up. With encouragement perhaps, but I don’t think we should try to pass the blame entirely onto the Dhroo.”

  Madja’s glare faded. Anne Larson’s smile broadened.

  And the cacophony began again.

  “What I want to know,” interrupted someone else, “—is how we’re going to explain to humanity that we’ve sold them into slavery?”

  “—can’t win a war against the slugs. We’ll have to—”

  “—really need to buy time. As much as we can—”

  “—but if we shut down our information requests, we’ll be admitting our bankruptcy. It’ll be a clear declaration of our intent to default. We can’t for a moment suggest that we’re up against it or they might initiate a premature foreclosure. We don’t know what they might do. Besides, if we keep downloading, we might discover something that—”

  “—need to begin preparing the home front. Maybe there’s a pretty face we can put on this situation; call it an Inter-Galactic Peace Corps, or something—”

  “Another issue to consider—this whole thing is so out of character for the Dhrooughleem. They’d rather die than insult a guest. There must be something else going on—”

  “And maybe there is nothing else going on. Maybe we misinterpreted. Maybe the message is a simple expression of concern, and an offer of help—”

  “Very unlikely,” said Kasahara. The certainty of his tone cut through the chatter like a knife. “The Dhrooughleem are polite. Not stupid. They have as many ulterior motives as any other species on this rock.”

  “Maybe they’re trying to trigger a panic over here—” suggested someone else.

  “Well, they’ve succeeded in doing that,” Larson acknowledged, brushing her sandy-colored hair back off her forehead; she was already fading to gray at the temples.

  “No,” said Kasahara. He leaned forward earnestly. “Even that much aggression is very out of character for them. The Dhrooughleem do not get aggressive—they get polite. Very very polite. Given the circumstances, the politest thing that they can do is make the first offer. I expect that we’re going to be getting quite a few other offers of indenture very soon—especially if we’re as close to the debt limit as the Dhrooughleem Liaison says. No, the Dhrooughleem aren’t being eager here; that would be discourteous, and they are never discourteous. They’re bending themselves backward to be polite. It just so happens that in this case, being polite means giving us the earliest possible opportunity to resolve our information debt.”

  “And then there’s this possibility—” said Yake quietly, and all eyes turned abruptly to him. It was the first time he’d spoken since the uproar began. “I suspect that the Dhrooughleem are indentured themselves to another species, I don’t know which one. And I don’t even know why I suspect this, but it might be worth the effort to look for some confirming evidence. If they are working off a debt of their own, and if we do indenture ourselves to them, then we get to work off not only our own indenture, but theirs as well.”

  There was silence around the table.

  Yake added, “I’m beginning to think that there are very many complex layers of indenture here, so
that whoever we might indenture ourselves to is going to be making a very good price off our work—”

  “You talk as if indenture is inevitable—” suggested the Ambassador quietly.

  “I think it may very well be. Sorry sir, but my sense of the InterChange is that it’s a pyramid scheme—and somebody has to be on the bottom.”

  “Da,” said the Madja Poparov. “This is exactly what my government has been afraid of for all hundred and sixty-seven years we have been participating—that we would be trapped by alien imperialists. Now we know what that trap is. Did no one ever think we were going to have to pay this bill someday?”

  “Nobody took it seriously,” retorted Larson, “—because nobody ever thought the bill would come due. Or that anyone would ever come by to collect. By the way, did the Soviet Union ever repay its World War II debts to Britain and the United States?”

  “That is not the issue.” Poparov looked annoyed. “Who was entrusted with this responsibility? And why haven’t they been properly tried?”

  “Ahem? We’re getting off purpose again,” suggested Yake.

  Both the women glared at him.

  The Ambassador stepped into the moment of silence with a question. “You said something a moment ago, Yake, something about a . . . pyramid scheme?”

  “Yes, sir. Everybody pays the guy upstairs, and the guy on the top floor ends up flush. The guys on the bottom, however, get stuck with the bill for everything. I think that the InterChange is set up to put the new guys—that’s us—in the basement.”

  The Ambassador turned the thought over in his mind. “That’s a very interesting analogy, Yake,” he said finally. “But it condemns the whole InterChange.”

  “Sorry, sir. That’s just the way it looks to me.”

  “Okay, let’s assume it for one minute. Is the situation we’re in accidental or deliberate? Did we do it ourselves out of our own ignorance, or . . . do you also think that the Dhrooughleem deliberately entrapped us?”