Read Online Becalmed by Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Free Book Online Page A

through that desert, to the borders where I knew the
Xenth would find me. I’m the one who made it to that village, against all odds.
     
    I did not give up.
     
    And I should have.
     
    “You haven’t thought it through,”
he says. “They tricked us.”
     
    I blink, frown, then get up. I
walk the plate to the recycling unit. If I don’t eat that food, someone else
should get the nutrients.
     
    “They didn’t trick me,” I say
with my back to him. “I went to that violence pool of my own free will.”
     
    “Not the Quurzod,” he says. “The
Xenth.”
     
    I turn. I didn’t deal with the
Xenth. Most of the negotiations with the Xenth happened before I was brought
into the discussions.
     
    I am suddenly cold.
     
    He’s looking at his hands. “They
tricked all of us.”
     
    I walk back and sit down. I wait.
     
    He raises his head. Those lines,
those sad eyes.
     
    “Think about it,” he says. “The
imbalance of power that has existed there for centuries. Then, one day, a fleet
of ships arrives, a fleet with more power than the Xenth can imagine. And we
offer to help.”
     
    He twists his hands together. He
has thought of this for a long time.
     
    “They ask the initial
negotiators, they say—”
     
    “If we ask you to obliterate the
Quurzod, you would do so?” I
whisper this in Xenth. I have read the documentation. They did say that, and
the initial negotiators wrote it off as a test.
     
    I believed the initial
negotiators. After all, they’re the ones on the ground. They watch body
language. They know the culture—or should know the culture. They’re the ones
who understand what is going on.
     
    Besides, the Xenth’s question
wasn’t unusual. Every culture we encounter wants to know our limits. Our limits
are that we help, we do not engage.
     
    Unless we are engaged first.
     
    Coop quotes the line, ignoring my
Xenth, which he does not understand. He is used to me muttering in other
languages. I have done it as long as he has known me. “We refuse to destroy
Quurzod. We spend time studying the situation, and then we offer our diplomatic
services to the Xenth. But during the time we studied them, the Xenth studied
us.”
     
    So buttoned up, so formal and
proper. Hidden, too, but we should have expected that.
     
    Only that isn’t my mistake. I
wasn’t with the initial group. The initial groups came from elsewhere in the
Fleet, and somehow they overcame—or maybe never had—their aversion to the
Xenth, and their hissing, sibilant-filled language.
     
    I, on the other hand, never
trusted them.
     
    But I did trust my commanders. I
trusted my orders, figuring they all knew the history, the facts, the
personalities of both sides.
     
    “The Xenth knew,” Coop says. “They
knew about the violence; they’ve suffered from it. They accused the Quurzod of
massacres, not telling us that this was part of Quurzod culture, that they kill
anyone—regardless of nationality—if they violate certain rules. The Xenth made
sure we did not know those rules. They sent us in blind.”
     
    It is so easy to blame another
culture. But I shake my head. I believe in mistakes before I believe in
deviousness.
     
    “That can’t be true,” I say. “The
Xenth left too much to chance.”
     
    “They left nothing to chance,” he
says. “If we had actually figured out a way to negotiate with the Quurzod, the
Xenth would have gained a solid border, some defined territory, an end to a
long war. But if we did not find a way to negotiate, if we aggravated the
Quurzod, the Quurzod would come after us. They would have engaged us—”
     
    “And the Xenth’s war would have
become our war,” I say. He’s right. The logic is inescapable. It explains my
unease. It explains the lack of preparation the Fleet’s diplomatic team gave to
my team. The Fleet’s team was tricked.
     
    I don’t usually believe in the
duplicity of other cultures, but this is too big a mistake to miss—at least on
the part of the