Her first uncensored news made Swelk wonder if she had gone mad.
The broadcasts she had monitored most of the way to Earth had shown humanity resolving old grievances, de-alerting its missiles, reducing its weapons of mass destruction. Stepping away from the nuclear brink . . .
Since she'd been excluded from the broadcasts, which had not been a long time, much of that progress had been reversed. The latest reports made clear that tensions had ratcheted up again. The airwaves were full of threats and dangerous bravado.
An even bigger shock was the other story that dominated the human media: the visit of the Galactics. Other starfarers had arrived at about the same time as the Consensus. Earth was being appraised for membership in some interstellar commonwealth. Earth's evaluators were welcomed everywhere, lured by the promise of the Galactics' fusion technology to those nations that cooperated.
The Krulirim had had interstellar travel for generations, without encountering a people as capable as themselves—not even, until now, anyone as advanced as the humans. Some intelligent species had failed to exit the Stone Age. Those that had achieved higher technology universally reversed course, living pathetically amid the mysterious and often deadly ruins of their own former greatness.
The Galactic species touring and inspecting Earth bore no resemblance to any intelligent race known to Krulchukor science. A recognizable offshoot of an otherwise self-destructive race would have made some sense, would have been satisfying to her. That wasn't the case—the F'thk were totally unknown. If she couldn't account for this one species, what explanation could there be for the appearance of a whole multispecies federation?
And while the F'thk were all over the humans' news, she saw not one Krul.
How could it be that she'd overheard nothing, from anyone on the Consensus, of the supposed impossible: starfarers of a species other than their own?
In her confusion, she almost forgot to reemerge from the lifeboat to continue her zookeeper duties. The trilling alarm of her pocket clock saved her. She would surely have died of disappointment and curiosity if, deception discovered, she again lost touch with events on Earth. She programmed the lifeboat's computer to record selected topics and sources for her, then reluctantly returned to the cargo hold.
With renewed feelings of guilt, Swelk arranged for the unexplained ailment to spread to two other Girillian species. She needed lots of time unsupervised.
"Captain." Swelk tipped her torso toward Grelben respectfully, carefully keeping her bad limb behind her, out of his line of sight. Stretching the shortened limb this way was painful, but normals took hiding of her infirmity as a sign of respect.
Experimentation had shown that he was least antagonistic when they were away from the humans. They were in Earth orbit now. "May I have a moment of your time, sir?"
His olfactory organs wrinkled. "Make it quick. You stink of those foul creatures in the hold."
"My apologies, sir." The bastard: having paid for her passage, she was doing the work his crew found too objectionable. That was unimportant and by her own design; she tamped down the irrelevant thought, unexpressed. "I wondered about your contacts with the humans. Was I right? Does it look like they will succeed?"
"It does not seem so. In fact, they are moving quickly towards blowing themselves up." He flexed an extremity. The expression was thoughtful, yes, but also implied something else. Anticipation? "At least this bunch will be remembered better than most. We'll have records of what they accomplished and how it ended."
There was a time when Swelk would have accepted Grelben's statements without question. Growing up a freak, her defects a cause for comment by every passerby, she often hid herself away. Still, as unskilled as were her interpersonal skills, his comments failed to ring true.
"So we will do more than save copies of their own broadcasts?" The two eyes turned toward her narrowed in momentary suspicion, then relaxed. Though Grelben's inability to see Swelk as an equal served her purposes, she fumed inwardly. Underestimating the freak was a too-common reaction.
"Rualf's troupe is making additional recordings with their own equipment. We may also be able to save some human artifacts."
"Then I guess we're doing everything we can." His eyes narrowed briefly again before once more rejecting the possible double meaning.
That her words could have a double meaning—despite not knowing what that second denotation could be—was a chilling confirmation of her darkest fears.
The hastily programmed data filter had worked well: Swelk's next visit to the lifeboat was rewarded with an eye-popping collection of television intercepts.
The presence of the Galactics changed the bigger picture. It would be tragic if the humans, so close to achieving maturity, self-destructed, but her bigger dream was intact. The Galactics, wherever they came from, had obviously attained social maturity. Here was companionship for the Krulirim. Here were alternative body forms, and intelligences who would have no reason to disparage what to them would surely be Swelk's very minor differences.
More than anything, she ached to visit the Galactic mother ship. The human media seemed every bit as fascinated with it as she; telescopic views of the habitat-sized vessel were backdrop to many news broadcasts. The lifeboat's computer did the conversion from human units of measurement: the spacecraft waiting in orbit around Earth's moon was enormous, as large as Krulchuk's own third-largest moon. The object's perfectly burnished surface, bristling with countless antennae and hatches, made plain that this was an artificial structure.
The human media seemed never to tire of covering F'thk visits to Earth's cities. Those visits, she first thought, came in approximate order of political importance. Coverage of Earth's other major story, the slide toward nuclear war, corrected her impression. The F'thk ship was frequenting, in approximate order of destructive capability, the capitals of Earth's declared and suspected nuclear powers.
An insistent alarm recalled her again to her duties at slopping the animals and hosing down feces-covered decks. "Just one more video," she promised herself, resetting the timepiece to extend her stay briefly. It was a good decision: the next item in the queue was coverage of the initial F'thk visit to a city called Teheran.
Unlike the Galactic mother ship, the F'thk landing ship was of a scale with which Swelk could identify. Using individuals in the welcoming crowd for scale, she decided that the F'thk vessel was somewhat smaller than the interstellar passenger ship on which she had begun her grand tour. That vessel, the Unity, was her standard of reference; shuttle-crew hostility had kept her in her cabin on approach to the in-orbit, about-to-depart Consensus.
The F'thk gave speeches. Dark-skinned humans with facial hair gave speeches. A nondescript Hovercraft deployed from the ship to deliver a kiosk of some sort to an Iranian park. The F'thk spokesperson operated the machine, extracting and distributing ceremonial objects of some sort. She fast-forwarded: long after the dignitaries left, masses of people queued up for the souvenirs.
Her alarm chimed again, and this time she dared not wait. She closed the lifeboat behind her and returned to the unaccustomed physical labor that made so much possible for her.
Though the knowledge had been slow in coming, Swelk had learned to recognize Rualf's correct manners as a manifestation of his art and a disguise for his contempt. Now Swelk would test her own skills of deception. The next time the actor summoned her to discuss a bit of intercepted video, Swelk was sensitized for any evidence or clues, no matter how veiled.
She tipped her sensor stalks one way after another, as if the flat image would reveal new information from the various perspectives. Play the fool. "I recognize the human behind the desk. He is often in the material you show me. Who is he?"
"The leader of their most powerful subdivision. He is called the President."
"And these others?"
"Advisors of the President. Now listen." Rualf repeated the video.
She listened carefully to the recording, then asked for a replay. "This subdivision, this country, feels threatened by another called Russia. Those sound like alternative nuclear-warfare strategies under review."
"Certainly," said Rualf, his tone indicating impatience. Belaboring the obvious was not why he deigned to deal with her. And if nuclear-strike planning was under way, then the horrible crisis that Swelk dreaded could be almost upon the humans.
"My question, Rualf, is this: why would they broadcast such stuff? Detailed planning for an all-out war is surely meant to be secret."
"This is not from a broadcast," Rualf conceded.
"I am astonished they would discuss these matters in front of visiting Krulirim, or allow you to record them."
Rualf was silent for a long time; Swelk wondered if her probing had been too overt. Boastfulness eventually defeated caution. "These are not matters they would care to discuss in front of outsiders." He whistled sharply in amusement. "Did you hear what I said? In front. I've been dealing with these absurd creatures for too long.
"Never mind that, you are right—and since you recognized this isn't a human video, I may as well make it easier to view." He adjusted a control, changing the presentation to 3-D, then rewound toward the midpoint of the recording. "Here. See that crystalline sphere in a bowl on a metallic base on the President's desk? We give those spheres out as gifts all over Earth, especially to the decision makers. The images we are watching are from another such globe elsewhere in his office.
"It's a passive audiovisual recording device. Periodically we scan their major cities with steerable microwave beams. The microwaves provide momentary power to the devices to upload whatever they've recorded."
Rualf misunderstood her dumfounded look. "I'm not surprised that you never encountered these gadgets. We use them all the time in making 3-V films, but moviemaking is the only way I've ever seen them used."
She had seen such objects, however. The surreptitious Krulchukor bugging device was one of the souvenirs manufactured by the Galactic Friendship Stations and distributed by the F'thk.