Departures (52 page)

“My name is Naplak Naplak Kap,” he said. “I have not seen your kind before. Is it polite to ask what you are called?”

“I’m Walter Harbron,” I answered. “Walt will do.”

“Walt,” Naplak Naplak Kap said gravely. Just then Joe came over with our drinks. I took a pull at my beer; the Foitan half-emptied his new bottle. “Walt,” he said again. He studied me. His eyes were large. They didn’t seem to blink. “May I ask about your species? I do so only from curiosity and mean no offense.”

“Yes, go ahead. May I ask about yours as well? I’ve never met any Foitani before; I’d like to learn more about you.”

Naplak Naplak Kap’s shrug was massive. “I came to this world to learn more myself. I am by profession a recoverer of
the past, and we Foitani have much past to recover. What does your race call itself, and why are you here?”

“We’re humans. As for me—” I shrugged. “I travel from star to star. I buy things, I sell things: sometimes material things, sometimes information. I haven’t starved yet.”

“Ah. Profit.” The bug’s flat translation didn’t give me any feel for how Naplak Naplak Kap felt about profit. Then he rumbled, “Humans. Yes, I’ve heard of you people. You’re widespread these days, aren’t you?”

“We’ve done well for ourselves.” I shrugged again. I didn’t want to tell him that humans ranged as widely now as his folks had at their peak. Sure, we’re just one species among many, but I still didn’t want him to take it the wrong way. He was too big to risk riling.

“
Humans
,” he repeated, this time, I thought, more to himself than to me. Suddenly he seemed to remember I was there. “Excuse me. I seem to recall something about your species in a data base from our ancient days that the Raptics showed me. My computer did a better job of reading it than the locals could. May I check?”

“Go ahead,” I told him. (What was I going to say?)

His computer looked like a computer—not like what we build, but it couldn’t have been anything else. He talked with it in a language my bug couldn’t handle. I suppose it was his own. He finished his bottle, almost absentmindedly.” Yes, here we are,” he said at last.

He spent long enough reading that, had he been a human, he would have been a rude one. Every so often he’d grunt. I didn’t know whether he was surprised or angry or curious or what. Finally I got bored waiting. I said, “May I ask what your records show?”

Once more, it was as if he had to remind himself I was sitting with him. “Oh, yes, of course. I apologize.” He put the computer back out of sight; by the way he rumbled about, my guess was that he wore it in a belt pouch. Then his eyes found mine again. “According to this data base, your species should not exist.”

“We’ve tried to do that to ourselves a few times,” I said, laughing. “Hasn’t worked yet.” I drank some more beer. It was good. I could feel the chair pressing against my behind. “I’m real enough. We’re all real.”

“But you should not be,” Naplak Naplak Kap said. He didn’t
have much in the way of a sense of humor. Whether that goes for Foitani in general I couldn’t tell you. “Let me explain.”

“Go ahead.” I nodded. (One more time: what was I going to say?)

“You know we once ruled in this part of space, yes?” (I nodded again.) “We explored farther yet, and once we touched on what I think must be your world.” He dug out the computer again, did some quick figuring. “In the coordinates the Raptics use, the location of the planet’s star was—”

I pulled my own computer out of my pocket, turned Raptic numbers into my kind … and felt my jaw drop. Those numbers worked out to just over a light-year from Sol. I rubbed my nose, which was starting to get numb. I said, “I guess that has to be my star, but the location’s not quite right.”

“You forget,” Naplak Naplak Kap said, “these records are 28,000 of my years old.”

I felt like an idiot (not for the first time). Stars didn’t move fast, not compared to light, but they did move, and in umptyump thousand years Sol had gone a good ways. “Yes, I did forget,” I said humbly. “Tell me about my savage ancestors.”

“They were,” Naplak Naplak Kap said. “They were vicious, too, and clever. One tribe managed to kill a Foitan despite his armor and weaponry, and was in the process of roasting him when my people took vengeance—from the air, at long range. We had learned.”

“And so?” I asked. (What I wanted to do was cheer for those poor doomed cavemen.)

“And so we decided that even savage humans were dangerous, and that they should not be allowed to live to develop technology: we decided to destroy them.” The bug in my ear put no expression into the words, which made them doubly chilling. Naplak Naplak Kap went on, “My species, it appears, did this often enough to have developed a protocol for it. We knew what we were about, I assure you.”

“Go on,” I ground out. Humans weren’t innocent of such things, not while we were still on Terra and, sadly, not always after we got off, either. But having someone calmly talk about strangling us in our cradle—

“We prepared a respiratory virus genetically tailored to ensure that your species would not become immune to it, then disseminated it widely throughout your planet’s atmosphere. In a few generations, you should have disappeared, and your world
would have been there for the taking. But our own Suicide Wars started soon after, so we never went back.”

“And we never died out.” I felt like crowing.

“So you didn’t.” Guessing aliens’ expressions is a fool’s game, but Naplak Naplak Kap’s seemed to say he thought it was my fault. “So far as I know, yours is the only species of which that is true.”

In the middle of my triumphant chuckle, I sneezed three times in a row.

“My bug does not translate that noise,” Naplak Naplak Kap said.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a cold …”

I looked at Naplak Naplak Kap. He looked at me. Than I waved to Joe and bought him another drink. (What was I supposed to do?)

Harry Turtledove
was born in Los Angeles in 1949. He has taught ancient and medieval history at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, and Cal State L.A., and has published a translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle, as well as several scholarly articles. He is also an award-winning full-time writer of science fiction and fantasy. His alternate history works have included several short stories and novels, including
The Guns of the South, How Few Remain
(winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel), the Great War epics:
American Front
and
Walk in Hell
, the Colonization books:
Second Contact
and
Down to Earth, and American Empire: Blood and Iron
. He is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters: Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.

Don’t miss this acclaimed novel
from Harry Turtledove
,
the Master of Alternate History!

THE GUNS
OF THE SOUTH

Published by Del Rey Books
.
Available in bookstores everywhere
.

Please read on
for an exciting excerpt from this
thrilling adventure
of alternate history …

Robert E. Lee paused to dip his pen once more in the inkwell. Despite flannel shirt, uniform coat, and heavy winter boots, he shivered a little. The headquarters tent was cold. The winter had been harsh, and showed no signs of growing any milder.
New Eng fand weather
, he thought, and wondered why God had chosen to visit it upon his Virginia.

With a small sigh, he bent over the folding table once more to detail for President Davis the arrangements he had made to send General Hoke’s brigade down into North Carolina for the attack on New Berne. He had but small hope the attack would succeed, but the President had ordered it, and his duty was to carry out his orders as best he could. Even without the boats, the plan he had devised was not actually a bad one, and President Davis reckoned the matter urgent …

He shook his head. Keeping the Army of Northern Virginia fed and clothed was a never-ending struggle. His men were
making their own shoes now, when they could get leather, which was not often. The ration was down to three-quarters of a pound of meat a day, along with a little salt, sugar, coffee—or rather, chicory and burnt grain—and lard. Bread, rice, corn … they trickled up the Virginia Central and the Orange and Alexandria Railroad every so often, but not nearly often enough. He would have to cut the daily allowance again, if more did not arrive soon.

President Davis, however, was as aware of all that as Lee could make him. To hash it over once more would only seem like carping. Lee resumed:
Genl Early is still in the—

A gun cracked, quite close to the tent. Soldier’s instinct pulled Lee’s head up. Then he smiled and laughed at himself. One of his staff officers, most likely, shooting at a possum or a squirrel. He hoped the young man scored a hit.

But no sooner had the smile appeared than it vanished. The report of the gun sounded—odd. It had been an abrupt bark, not a pistol shot or the deeper boom of an Enfield rifle musket. Maybe it was a captured Federal weapon.

The gun cracked again and again and again. Each report came closer to the one before than two heartbeats were to each other.
A Federal weapon indeed
, Lee thought:
one of those fancy repeaters their calvary like so well
. The fusillade went on and on. He frowned at the waste of precious cartridges—no Southern armory could easily duplicate them.

He frowned once more, this time in puzzlement, when silence fell. He had automatically kept count of the number of rounds fired. No Northern rifle he knew was a thirty-shooter.

He turned his mind back to the letter to President Davis.
—Valley
, he wrote. Then gunfire rang out again, an unbelievably rapid stutter of shots, altogether too quick to count and altogether unlike anything he had ever heard. He took off his glasses and set down the pen. Then he put on a hat and got up to see what was going on.

At the tent fly, Lee almost collided with one of his aides-de-camp, who was hurrying in as he tried to leave. The younger man came to attention. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

“Quite all right, Major Taylor. Will this by any chance have something to do with the, ah, unusual gun I heard fired just now?”

“Yes, sir.” Walter Taylor seemed to be holding on to military discipline with both hands. He was, Lee reminded himself, only twenty-five or so, the youngest of all the staff officers. Now he
drew out a sheet of paper, which he handed to Lee. “Sir, before you actually see the gun in action, as I just have, here is a communication from Colonel Gorgas in Richmond concerning it.”

“In matters concerning ordnance of any sort, no view could be more pertinent than that of Colonel Gorgas,” Lee agreed. He drew out his reading glasses once more, set them on the bridge of his nose.

Lee folded the letter, handed it back to Taylor. As he returned his glasses to their pocket, he said. “Very well, Major. I was curious before; now I find my curiosity doubled. Take me to Mr.—Rhoodie, was it?”

“Yes, sir. He’s around behind the tents here. If you will come with me—”

Breath smoking in the chilly air, Lee followed his aide-decamp. He was not surprised to see the flaps from the other three tents that made up his headquarters were open; anyone who had heard that gunfire would want to learn what had made it. Sure enough, the rest of his officers were gathered round a big man who did not wear Confederate gray.

The big man did not wear the yellow-brown that was the true color of most home-dyed uniforms, either, nor the black of the general run of civilian clothes. Lee had never seen an outfit like the one he had on. His coat and trousers were of mottled green and brown, so that he almost seemed to disappear against dirt
and brush and bare-branched trees. A similarly mottled cap had flaps to keep his ears warm.

Seeing Lee approach, the staff officers saluted. He returned the courtesy. Major Taylor stepped ahead. “General Lee, gentlemen, this is Mr. Andries Rhoodie. Mr. Rhoodie, here is General Lee, whom you may well recognize, as well as my colleagues, Majors Venable and Marshall.”

“I am pleased to meet all you gentlemen, especially the famous General Lee,” Rhoodie said.

“You are much too kind, sir,” Lee murmured politely.

“By no means,” Rhoodie said. “I would be proud to shake your hand.” He held out his own.

As they shook, Lee tried to take the stranger’s measure. He spoke like an educated man, but not like a Carolinian. His accent sounded more British, though it also held a faint guttural undertone.