Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [30]
A day came when a newly arrived sanitation tech appeared, luggage in tow, to claim his previously unassigned cubicle. Finding someone already living within, both thranx referred the situation to the official in charge of housing. Preoccupied with more serious matters, she acknowledged that it was clear some degree of oversight had been at work. With Ulunegjeprok and other coworkers vouching for the amiable Des, she simply reassigned the newcomer to a different vacant cubicle, at which point the shelter the poet had earlier appropriated was officially entered into the hive records as his.
With an official residence, an accepted line of credit into which seasonal income was placed—as soon as the hive financial officer was informed by Des’s friends that he was not being paid, the oversight was hastily corrected—and an occupation, Desvendapur’s reinvention as Desvenbapur was complete. The chance of exposure still existed, but with each succeeding day it became less and less likely. Finding himself gifted with another highly efficient and willing assistant who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, the food division supervisor was more than happy to have the additional, to all intents and purposes legitimate, help. Des’s name began to creep, by default, into the official records of daily life at the complex. Desvenbapur the food preparator came into conclusive existence through the inherited process of bureaucratic osmosis.
He learned that anyone associating in any capacity, however distant, with the visiting humans was encouraged to learn more about them. Des was quick to take advantage of these free educational facilities. His off-duty hours were spent poring over the history of thranx-human contact, the official records of the ongoing project on Hivehom, and the hesitant but ongoing attempts to broaden contact between the two radically different, cautious species. There was nothing in the official records about another project at Geswixt. As far as publicly available history went, the complex did not exist.
He was afraid to be promoted, but commendations came his way in spite of his efforts to avoid them. The alternative was to work less diligently, to slack off on the job, but that might attract even more attention, and of an unwanted sort. So while striving to endear himself to his coworkers, he struggled to do that work which was assigned to him and little more, seeking safety in anonymity.
Already more knowledgeable about human food intake than all but the biochemists and other specialists, Desvendapur absorbed what knowledge was available about everything from the bipeds’ appearance to their tastes in art and amusement to their mating habits. That a great deal was marked unknown did not surprise him. Though improving, contact between the species was still tentative and infrequent, proceeding officially only at the single recognized project site on Hivehom.
The reason for the clandestine complex at Geswixt was obvious: Both sides wanted to speed the pace of contact, to increase the opportunities for an exchange of views, and to stimulate learning. But it had to be done in such a way as not to alarm the general populace. Even after some fourteen years, each side was still far from confident they could trust the other. The thranx had more experience than they wished with duplicitous, deceitful intelligences, among whom the AAnn stood foremost. Sure, these soft-skinned mammals seemed sociable enough, but what if it were all a