Lost and found_ a novel - Alan Dean Foster [108]
“Yes yes.” Tzharoustatam was nothing if not understanding. “But there is the small problem of choosing a direction, and securing the means, and affecting the proper timing. Not something, I regret, that falls within my sphere of responsibility. In order to pursue the matter further you must in any event control your impatience and your desires until we reach Seremathenn. At that time you will, I am certain, be put in contact with those authorities who are best positioned to look after your wishes.”
These consoling words were all efficiently translated by the Vilenjji implant. No doubt accurately, with careful regard being paid to colloquialisms, slang, and inflection. Walker had only one problem with it. The problem was that he felt he had heard it before, in the course of doing business back home, and on more than one occasion.
Though courteous and even politely affectionate, it felt all too much as if their host was delivering unto them that ominous business benediction widely known back in inconceivably distant Chicago as the brush-off.
16
Seremathenn was a beautiful world, not unlike Earth, the vision of which in the viewer was dominated by streaks of cloud as white as the Sessrimathe starship and a single large, heartbreakingly symbolic ocean. Walker did not have much time to contemplate the rapidly swelling image because he and his companions were instructed to prepare themselves for landing in a manner as respectful as it was distinctive.
These Sessrimathe, they admire us, he found himself thinking as he struggled to comply with the instructions for arrival. For what we have endured, for what we have survived. For what we tried to do in our attempt to escape from the Vilenjji ship. They just don’t admire us enough to get us home.
Maybe he was being unfair, he told himself. Maybe Tzharoustatam had been entirely honest when he had told them there was no practical way of finding their homeworlds. Maybe he, Walker, was refusing to believe it because to accept the facts as stated would be to admit to himself that he would never see anything familiar ever again—not his friends, not his condo, not Mr. and Mrs. Sonderberg’s corner deli, not his world. All the things he had followed so closely for so many years—shifts in the market, the Bears and the Bulls (in their sporting as well as financial manifestations), movies, music, television, all the cares and cries and consolations of Earth—meant nothing now. He was being obliged not only to put aside his former life, but his former existence as a human being. Abduction had forcibly transformed him. Deprived of everything he had once known, what was he now? What was to become of Marcus Walker, B.A., M.B.A. University of Michigan, starting outside linebacker his junior and senior years, Phi Beta Delta, late a shining light of the firm of Travis, Hartmann, and Davis, Inc.? They were landing.
He would soon find out.
They thought they had prepared themselves. Walker was sure their previous months spent in captivity aboard the Vilenjji vessel, coupled with their extended escape attempt and subsequent rescue by the Sessrimathe, had primed him for almost anything. George was of similar mind. Both anticipated Seremathenn to be something like Chicago, only on a . . . well, on a galactic scale.
As ever, the only things shared by imagining and experiencing were their suffixes.
The great conurbation of Autheth had not been built; it had been grown. To Walker and George the description of its manner of fabrication sounded more like magic than science; to Braouk it smacked of ancient alchemy; and to Sque—while acknowledging its beauty and marvels, the K’eremu dismissed the technique with an airy wave of several appendages.
“We amuse ourselves with similar construction modi on K’erem, though admittedly to a lesser degree. Having no need to congregate in such preposterous numbers, our analogous efforts are focused more on aesthetic refinement than vulgarities of scale.”
Leaning over quite far, spearpoint-sized teeth very close to the human’s shoulder, Braouk whispered