“Oh God,” Liam whispered in horror. He couldn’t imagine the pain and terror those Rownt had suffered. And for parents to watch their younglings gasp and freeze and die and be helpless to protect them. Now Liam wanted to hunt down the Cy and kill them.
The Grandmother showed her fangs. “They learned to regret that decision,” she said with grim amusement. Liam could imagine. The storyscrolls were full of tales of righteous anger from Grandmothers defending the young. In fact, if Liam ever wanted to guarantee death, he would hurt a Rownt youngling. The bloodbath that would follow would ensure no survival.
After stretching her nostrils back out to normal shape and shaking out her arms, the Grandmother continued. “After that, if we could board the ship, we generally found any Rownt very near the place where the hull had breached. The Cy learned not to touch our younglings, and we learned that the Cy would go to any length to protect their great ships.”
“Their ships?” Liam had assumed the Cy had been protecting themselves, not ships. That didn’t make sense, and he'd grown used to being able to twist his brain sideways to consider the universe from a different angle. “I don’t understand.”
The Grandmother’s continued pallor spoke of her own struggle to control her anger. Liam wondered how many generations back this had happened. Certainly the Rownt were comfortable in space now, but he didn’t know how many generations that had taken.
A memory tickled the back of Liam’s mind. The Grandmother on Prarownt who had first named Ondry tuk-status had said that her Grandmother had stood in the temple when Imshee arrived, but given the lifespan of Rownt and the ability of Grandmothers to lay eggs up to the day their bones finally crushed their internal organs, that might have been over two thousand years ago.
“For the Cy, their ship is not a tool. Their great ships are living creatures, inherited generation to generation and beloved. According to the Imshee, Cy are raised on a ship and have the ship's voice in their head from the time they are very young, so they feel about a ship the way we feel about a youngling.”
That was odd, but then aliens often were, Liam had learned. He had also learned that many lied. “Do you believe the Imshee?”
The Grandmother took a long time to answer, and for a moment, Liam feared that he had offended her. But she tilted her head and said, “I do not automatically believe anything an Imshee says. They view the world in a way that is very odd to me.” The skin around her eyes tightened in amusement. “But then humans are equally odd.”
“We are.” Liam was not about to defend his own species. He had recovered from his bout of anti-humanity bias, but humans were no saner than the rest of the universe, and the rest of the universe was some variety of crazy. Even his beloved Rownt had a good deal of insanity going for them, which apparently the Cy had discovered the hard way.
“The Rownt who were on those ships reported the Cy defended the walls. Those ships gave the Cy power over the universe for many millennia. The Imshee developed the technology to challenge the Cy, but the Imshee did not possess the strength or the willingness to battle the way Rownt do. They put their faith in technological war. She had to use the human word for that concept and her tail twitched as she said it. Clearly she considered “war” a synonym for insane. She was probably right, but then Rownt had their own version of insanity, and defining battle ending only when everyone was dead or too broken to continue was also a form of insanity.
“Why did you stay in space once you rescued your younglings?” Liam asked.
In storyscrolls, once a battle was won or a quest finished, the Rownt went back to life as it had been before. Hell, when humans had first found Rownt, they’d assumed the species was pre-industrial because they lived such simple lives, but it turned out that generation after generation of Rownt had chosen not to change, even when technology was available.
“What guarantee did we have that we had retrieved all our younglings,” she asked, “and what guarantee did we have that the Cy would not take more? The Imshee built too quickly. They showed us how their ships were made; they built to last two or three hundred years. That is less than the lifespan of a Rownt. We needed to make sure that there were better ships. Our technology might not be as advanced as the Imshee, but Cy retreat in the face of a Rownt ship the way they do not when they see Imshee. Knowing that, it gave us comfort to know that we could patrol our borders.” She said the last with great satisfaction. “TheCaltiwas the first ship Rownt built for ourselves, the first time we took Imshee technology and improved it to meet Rownt standards.”
No wonder the Imshee feared giving the Rownt technology. A pre-industrial society had taken the blueprints for a spaceship and improved it. That was more than impressive. “What do the Grandmothers of theCaltithink of humans now holding one of the Cy ships?” Liam asked. He assumed that was the true center of their conversation. Grandmothers never took a step without seeing three sources of profit in it.
The Grandmother watched the temple with the younger Grandmothers clustered about, some more obvious than others as they listened. “If humans do not imitate Cy, I have no opinion on their technology. If humans do, we will teach them the same lesson.”
That was a rather unambiguous threat. “I'm sure humans understand that,” Liam said.
She did not look at him. “Most do. I hope these humans on the Cy ship do. Perhaps someone will explain the color and shape of reality to them.” She struggled to her feet, her massive frame almost too much for her knees. But once she got upright, she headed toward the stairs.
Liam needed to talk to Ondry. They should make time in the schedule for a little extra information trading. Some days Liam missed the old house on Prarownt and the slower lifestyle, but as long as they were tuk-ranked traders on theCalti, he and Ondry had a responsibility to make sure the Grandmother’s trades were carried out. And this was one mission Liam wanted to take because he never wanted to see Rownt and humans fighting, and that meant they had to understand one another well enough to see the mutually assured destruction that would result.
Liam wondered if these humans who had claimed this abandoned Cy ship understood the mess they’d fallen into.
