Vocabulary: I have named Megamind's species as the Yi#vi and Minion's as the Opuulu and their combined society as the Tseri#uu. (The # represents a gulping sound in the back of the throat.) Pair bonds between the species, formed in childhood, are the primary bond in Tseri#uu society. In the context of the Tseri#uu norm of a two-species family, the word I have represented as "father" actually means "male Yi#vi parent" and is the same for Yi#vi and Opuulu offspring. Similarly, the term translated as "boys" refers to male children of both species. The term "son", however, means male offspring of the same species as the parent.
When the Five Peoples first detected broadcast video signals from the planet later to be known to them as Earth, it looked pretty typical. Another Mammalian Diaspora species, early machine age technology, some rather laughable fictional speculation about the solar system and the galaxy around them, all the usual signs of a planetary culture just getting its wing feathers, so to speak. Scientists among the Five figured that they'd be popping out of their atmosphere, putting a few orbitals up, in about a generation. A handful of robot probes were sent. The data they brought back showed that things looked promising enough to send an explorer. It really should have been a Glau, but for political reasons it ended up being a Colna named Siligili-Reii. A year after departure, she send back a short message to the effect that, while the species looked promising, their sun didn't seem as stable as everyone seemed to think it was, and that she would be returning as soon as she'd made a few repairs. She was never heard from again.
Fifteen years later, a peculiar little spacecraft wandered into the sector. It consisted of the propulsion systems and homing device from Siligili-Reii's ship jerry-rigged onto a primitive space capsule typical of the sort of early chemical rocketry that the planet's space technologists had been known to be working on. Inside the capsule were a female infant and a stack of primitive data storage discs, together with a little device for displaying their contents.
The craft came out of hyperdrive into Col space, where it was picked up by a Colna high-orbital patrol. From there, it was sent to CSRS, the Cooperative Sector Research Station, the vast space habitat jointly operated by the Five Peoples. While the discs were being translated, Nayha Vreg, the Center's director, heard arguments about where the child should ultimately be raised, assuming that returning her to her own people proved impossible. The Eqa had too many things in their atmosphere that were poisonous to her; she would have to be kept in a bubble and later given a protective suit, like an Opuulu on land. The Glau breathed the same kind of air she did, but Glau children, being nearly indestructible, tend to play rough; as with the Eqa, she would have been unable to participate in normal activity. On Col, the problem was the tendency of little Colna to eat any living non-Colna creature they found. The one remaining option would be to send her to the Tseri#uu to be raised as an Yi#vi, but Director Nayha, an Yi#vi herself, was reluctant. What if the child couldn't bond with an Opuulu? The name Tseri#uu means The Paired Peoples; unpaired individuals were at a severe disadvantage. In the end, the Director decided that no planet was suitable. Rather, it was best for the child to grow up on CSRS, where no species formed a majority and, no matter what she couldn't do, there would be others who couldn't do it, either.
During her first year in the habitat, the discs were translated. The Five Peoples learned the name Earth, and the fate of Earth, reduced to a lifeless cinder when its sun went into a rare G-flare state. (The light of that flare would not reach the sector for another twenty-two years.) They also learned names for the child: patrilineal name, Ritchie; personal name, Roxanne. Her build was similar to that of an Yi#vi, but with Northern Glau coloring and a Glau head shape. Her body was weak and fragile, easily injured and slow to heal, compared to any other known intelligent mammal, and yet in all these things it was consistent with the medical text found on one of the discs. Apparently this was typical for her species. Nobody could quite see what her species was designed for. Someone floated the notion that the humans, as her species was called, were not designed at all, but were the wild seed stock from which all the other mammalian peoples were developed. If this theory became widely accepted, it would more or less guarantee her a reproduction permit, just for her specimen value. But as she grew up, this came to seem unacceptable to her. She didn't want to be valued just for the accident of her unique DNA. She wanted to deserve it.
Her greatest talent seemed to be for communication and the furthering of interspecies relations. Like any child growing up in a multilingual environment, she was quickly fluent in the four languages, but having no peer group of her own species to bias her, she also developed an equally thorough understanding of all four cultures. By the time she reached puberty, she was helping to orient adults newly arrived from their homeworlds. A few years past puberty, she found herself at the core of a controversy over whether she had taken interspecies relations a little too far.
It began when Ileiala-Atii, a young Colna known for years to be Roxanne's best friend, refused to return to the Atii clan house on Col to do her reproductive duty. Instead, Ileiala-Atii and Roxanne stood together in the Colna section of the habitat and declared that they were "in love", a term they'd had to cobble together, for the Colna did not acknowledge bonding between sexual partners; mother-child bonds and clan sisterhood were the entire basis of their family life. Ileiala-Atii said that she would never return to Col or lay fertile eggs of her own. Instead, she intended to adopt a mammalian lifestyle, marry Roxanne and remain in space for the rest of her life. Her Colna elders were outraged, some going so far as to argue that Ileiala-Atii should be forcibly returned to the clan house, forcibly fertilized and confined to Col for life, while public opinion in the rest of CSRS held that the young people ought to be allowed to make their own decisions.
Both sides appealed to the Director. She ruled that the young couple should make the decision, but not immediately and not in the habitat. Instead, Roxanne should be fitted with a protective suit, the sort that was usual for non-Colna visiting Col, and both of them should spend a month in the Atii clan house before making the decision. A rift in the relationship developed immediately. Roxanne was excited at the prospect of a long visit to Col. It would be her first time on a planet since her infancy on Earth. Ileiala-Atii wasn't so happy. She was afraid for Roxanne's safety and she was also, in an obscure Colna sort of way, both ashamed of Roxanne and ashamed of Col. She sensed that bringing the two together was going to result in a cultural head-on collision, and she turned out to be exactly right.
At first, Roxanne loved the armor and spent a pleasant afternoon in the habitat's recycling room, using her steel-clad fists to break things that were about to be disposed of. Then the first time she entered the clan house, eleven little Colna, none taller than her knee, swarmed up the armor and tried to eat her. One of them made it all the way up to her shoulder, grabbed a strand of her hair that had escaped, and tried to use it to pull her scalp up to its beak. She had been strictly coached not to brush them off. She waited while her beloved's grandmother and aunts coaxed the children off her with chunks of meat taken from a disturbingly ape-like carcass than hung on a hook in a corner of the room - except that it wasn't really a carcass. It was sedated, not dead, and as chunks of torso flesh were removed, she could see its bare organs working. What was worse for her was seeing how at home Ileiala-Atii was with all this, to the point of not being upset at all over the way the clan had deliberately chosen the most human-like available species of food animal to have hanging on that hook when she arrived. She later learned that her mastery of the Colna language and customary manners had impressed the clan elders to the point of softening their attitude somewhat, but her own attitude hardened at the same time. Even in a locked room, she was anxious every second she didn't have the armor on; it just about killed her sex drive, and sexual pleasure had been the basis of their relationship from the beginning. When Ileiala-Atii dumped her, saying that she realized she wanted to be a mother after all, Roxanne's main response was relief.
After that, Roxanne wanted nothing more than to return to CSRS, but by prior arrangement she was committed to meeting Director Nayha for a month at the director's son's home on Lup, the Tseri#uu homeworld. There she fiddled with machinery, assisted in laboratories, dove and swam and ate shellfish in the shallows in the company of the Paired Peoples, just as she had in the Tseri#uu section of the habitat, but under an open sky, amid the scents of a semi-wild ecosystem. She processed out the traumatic experiences of her sojourn on Col and began to think that maybe this being-on-a-planet thing might not be so bad.
This was just what Director Neyha had been waiting for. She proposed that Roxanne continue her education with a month each on the Eqa and the Glau homeworlds. If those visits went smoothly, Roxanne could return to the habitat as an assistant in the office of communication, doing intercultural interpretation and reporting news from CSRS to the rest of the sector. It sounded like just what the last human wanted: a chance to contribute and prove herself useful. So she went to Qua and wore a different kind of protective suit, to protect her from the atmosphere. The Eqa notion of the best way to introduce her to the planetary culture was to put her to work. So she participated in the ceremonial quenching of the nosecone of a new airship and she tracked down a glitch in an agricultural robot and she translated confidential documents in a continental governor's office. In the course of all this, she tried to ask all the Eqa she met about their private lives. She was amazed at how little they seemed to have. Family bonds were weak, close friendships rare. Work really was everything to these people. She went away thinking that she still hadn't gotten to the core of their culture, and that there was still more for her to understand.
On Abru, she joined a group sitting vigil around a small building which she knew to be the surface entrance to a much larger underground apartment. In that apartment, a Glau couple "molted," temporarily losing their invulnerability and super-strength so that they could conceive a child. In earlier and more dangerous centuries, the Glau sitting vigil were genuinely there to protect the couple. Now the vigil was largely ceremonial, but no Glau couple would think of doing without it. Every child of the other species, at some time, secretly wished to be a Glau, but most adolescents, when they learned about the reproductive system that went with the Glau powers, with molting and seven or eight days of sexual pleasure once every five years, were likely to decide it wasn't worth it. She saw the last of the gigantic animals that had once dominated this planet, a few specimens preserved for educational purposes, so the Glau would remember why they had chosen to be what they were.
When she returned to CSRS, she noticed for the first time how tiny it was. Seventeen miles long, two miles in diameter. Smaller than Peace Island on Lup. Culturally it was a patchwork made of fragments of the other cultures, held together by the economics of scientific research. Compared to any of the inhabited planets, it was hardly a place at all, but it was home, and she was glad to be home, and glad to contribute her little bit to that patchwork.
Five years later, the big antennae that scan the galaxy picked up another new source of video broadcast signals, this time from Ansarit Sector. Roxanne was teaching an orientation class, but she was called out of it to create the reports in the four languages that would go out to the sector. She was sophisticated enough by now to wonder why the class had been interrupted, given that she was hardly the only staff member who could have done this. She was also bold enough, once it was released, to ask Director Neyha about it.
"When your people were discovered," the elderly Yi#vi said, "my predecessor was far too cautious. With these people, I'm going to act much more quickly. We'll send eight probes this year. If everything looks good, then we'll send a team to make first contact. That team will be built around you."
"Me? Wha- Seriously?" Roxanne gasped. "I'm twenty-three years old. I would think someone more senior..."
"No. The trouble with senior people is that they think they already know. You will go in fully aware of your own ignorance. Therefore you will have your eyes open. Now let's see about filling out the rest of the roster." The director turned to the main screen on her desk. "A Colna of clan Reii for the planetologist. Probably Nethalinen-Reii. You'll want a Glau with fighting experience and plenty of it. And a pair, the Opuulu for the pilot and the Yi#vi for the machinist, a good improviser, ideally...oh." She looked up. "Roxanne, the way the rules are written, I can choose pretty much anyone I see fit for this expedition. However, when reaching into one's own people's fleet and pulling out its best pair, it is generally advisable to give the fleet commander a courtesy call, at least. Bring that chair around and sit behind me. You're about to learn something." While Roxanne did so, the director addressed the screen. "Open subradio channel from Director Nayha Vreg of the Cooperative Sector Research Station to Commander Ilu Vrouw, Tseri#uu fleet headquarters. Hullo, Vrouw." The screen showed the fleet insignia for a moment, then displayed a face, Yi#vi, male, with a scattering of gray strands in his beard. He was glaring at the screen.
"You want my boys*," he said without greetings.
"I didn't say that."
"And you won't. You'll tell me I'm free to select anyone who meets your qualifications, and it will just so happen that only one pair meets them. Listen, Vreg, we're about to drive the Colna out of this system completely. My boys* have a big part to play in that process and you-"
"The expedition's not leaving for at least a year."
"But you'll want them sooner because you know my son will insist on taking the ship apart and rebuilding it to his specifications."
"Will he? You're sure?"
"It's what I would do."
"All right. You've got me. How soon will you notify them of this assignment?"
"I won't."
"What?"
"You do it. They're going to be working with you on this, and there's no reason for them to inherit our little feud. Close channel." The commander's image was replaced by the text the director had been looking at before the call. The Director turned to Roxanne.
"That is the Yi#velit way with power. Vrouw bowed to the inevitable, saving us both valuable time, and expressed his dissatisfaction with the situation by being rude. That way he let me know that the next time I need his consent for something, it won't be easily given. Now watch the way Khenhig handles the same situation. He'll be calm and polite and, comparatively speaking, a pleasure to deal with, but he'll stall. He'll think of excuses. He'll waste everyone's time. And then, the next time I deal with him, it will be as if none of it had happened." She turned back to the screen. "Open subradio channel from Director Nayha Vreg of the Cooperative Sector Research Station to Commander Khenhig il Daniikyen, Glau fleet headquarters. Greetings, Khenhig"
Il Daniikyen was Tropic Glau, black of skin, hair and irises. His expression was, indeed, calm and polite. "Greetings, Director. How are you this day?"
"Busy. I'm putting together a team for the expedition to Ansarit Sector next year. I need a Glau fighter. Your best."
"That would be Colonel ir Wedrei."
"Still ir Wedrei? The man's longevity is amazing."
"And his selection for this expedition is a tremendous honor. We can't thank you enough. However, I'm afraid there's a little difficulty. The colonel's been captured."
"By which side?"
"Unknown at this point. I'm afraid he will take some finding."
"But you'll put in the order for reassignment now?"
"I can do that much now, but the regular prisoner exchange isn't for another eight days."
"And the expedition isn't until next year."
"Plenty of time, then."
"Can I ask you to at least start the process from your end? Just to have as much as possible done ahead of time?"
"Assuming that there are no administrative hitches."
"I have some authority in that regard. The expedition is a high-profile project. If the process does run into any hitches, I can appeal directly to the Supreme Council."
"Understood, Director."
"So you'll start now?"
"Of course. Anything else I can do for you?"
"Not necessary, Khenhig. And thank you. You've been very helpful."
"Always glad to be of service."
Another minute was spent in pleasantries before the Director closed the channel and turned to Roxanne.
"See what I mean about the Glau stalling?"
"But if their colonel really has been captured and his commander really doesn't know where he is, that's not really a stall, is it?"
"You have no idea how intertwined the services are. Khenhig could find out where ir Wedrei is with a few clicks. He's just being difficult, in that polite Glau way. But this works to our advantage in the long run. If we find him, we can bypass the prisoner exchange process and recruit him straight from wherever he's being held. But before we start the search, I want to notify the young Ilus. I've a feeling they could find the colonel as easily as Khenhig could."
That the Five Peoples, in their political manifestation as the Four Civilizations, could be doing business with each other, sending delegations back and forth, and co-operating on scientific and cultural endeavors while simultaneously sending fleets of fighter spacecraft to shoot each other out of the sky in distant star systems is an effect of the peculiar economics of space-faring societies. Certain minerals are absolutely necessary, and by the time a civilization has a serious interstellar presence, it has generally mined out and used up all of those necessary minerals available to it, not only on its homeworld, but anywhere in its star system. Thus, the force driving exploration of new star systems is the search for more of these minerals, and they are equally valuable whether the possessor finds them or steals them at ray gun-point from the finder. Any rich strike calls forth a dogfight over it, with small fighter spacecraft from at least three of the Four trying to drive each other off the prize. It's an environment in which individual prowess counts for almost everything, in which heroes are made, and in which the drawbacks to heroism can make themselves starkly clear.
Adrinoch ir Wedrei knew the drawbacks of heroism all too well. He'd been the greatest of the Glau space fighters for twenty years. Every Glau cheered his name, and many among the other Peoples, especially their military leaders, had reason to curse it. He had been showered with wealth he had no time to spend and privileges he was never in a position to exercise. He felt like a piece of equipment, an extension of his spacecraft, the tool his superiors chose for every job. Even battle itself, once his delight, had begun to seem unimportant, a buzzing of insects around a dropped sweet. Maybe the metaphor had occurred to him because that's the word his commander had used about the particular asteroid they were trying to take away from the Colna: sweet, loaded with rarities like niobium and germanium. From Colonel ir Wedrei's point of view, there was only one thing sweet about it; when the Tseri#uu showed up to try to steal it, his little buddy would almost certainly be among them.
When his unit came out of hyperdrive, battle was already joined, Tseri#uu and Colna fighter craft going at each other around the irregular lump of the asteroid. Colna landing units were busy on its surface, attaching jets and a hyperdrive, preparing to move the whole thing to Col space. Fighting was heaviest above them, as Tseri#uu landers attempted to seize the propulsion gear and redirect it toward one of the Tseri#uu worlds, while Colna defensive units held them off and Tseri#uu fighters tried to beat back the defense. Ir Wedrei gave the routine orders, some of the men under him being ordered to go around the blind side of the asteroid and come up low, under the fighting, to take the landers from both of them, while the rest, himself included, dove straight down into the thick of battle, providing distraction. This probably wouldn't work, given that the Tseri#uu in particular liked to surround contested asteroids with cameras, so the blind side wouldn't really be blind, but it was the best shot they had, and it would also give him a chance to put his personal agenda into play without being too obvious about it.
Down they came, a new constellation with jets and guns, complicating the fighting by an order of magnitude and negating any advantage of numbers that either of the other sides had. In the chaos that followed, it was just a matter of keeping track of who was where, waiting for the right moment and making just the right mistake, failing to get out of the way of a Colna laser cannon blast, taking it on the shield just so, letting it propel him away from his unit and toward the area of Tseri#uu strength, spinning wildly so that no one would notice when he reached back and gave a twist to his air hose, causing it to sprang a tiny, gentle leak, just enough to show up on the sensors. Then he opened his comm unit.
"My breather's hit," he reported. The Glau were nearly indestructible. Lack of air was almost the only thing that would really endanger them. "I need a pickup."
"We've got you, Dri." It was exactly the voice he'd hoped to hear: Ilu Menang, his little buddy's Opuulu. Even as he tumbled, he could see one Tseri#uu fighter peeling off, coming toward him. Menang was a helluva pilot, came alongside him and matched his tumble perfectly. There was Ilu Amnang, little buddy himself, in the gunner's seat, his blue head visible through the canopy as he put out the grapples and drew the two fighter craft together.
"As soon as we're close enough," Amnang said, "I want you to put your helmet against the canopy and eyeburn a hole at the spot where they touch. It'll fuse the polycarbonate and give you air."
"But, little buddy, the beam won't stop at that spot."
"I know. I'll duck, and I'll have a quick-patch ready for the hole in the far side." Glau fighter craft didn't have canopies. Except for the helmet, ir Wedrei had nothing but his uniform between his body and the vacuum. (His shield protected him from both projectiles and ray weapons but, being pure energy, it didn't hold air.) He powered off the shield as the two ships came together and did as instructed, pressing his helmet to the rear canopy of his erstwhile enemy's craft, shutting one eye, burning a hole with the other that joined his helmet to the gunner's compartment while the gunner himself pressed his upper body down against the controls. The beam passed over the blue back and out the other side of the canopy, making a second hole. Amnang sat up, slapping the patch over it. At the same time, il Wedrei wiggled thoughtfully. His craft was now joined to the Tseri#uu craft by his superpowered neck. It took a relatively slight movement to bring the two craft together in such a way as to snap the antennae off both ships.
"What the fuck, Dri?" That was Menang, his voice carried by conduction from the water-filled pilot's compartment through the little ship and the helmet joined to it.
"That could have been accidental," Amnang added, "but we all know it wasn't. What do you want to talk about that's so private, you've got to cut off communication with the rest of the universe?"
"I need your help." As ir Wedrei spoke, Menang started working the jets to slow their tumbling and get them moving toward the Tseri#uu support ship.
"For what?"
"To fake my death."
There was a moment of stunned silence and then Menang said "Are you sure you wouldn't rather just defect?"
"If I did that, your father* would find some excuse to have me back out here in a year, doing the same thing but for your side, and I want to quit. I've spend the last eight months building a false identity and transferring assets to it. If I can just get my real identity officially declared dead, I'll stow away on the next ship home and I'll never leave Abru again."
"But, Dri, we'd miss you," replied Amnang. "You're the only one that gives us a decent challenge anymore."
"Please. I'll make it worth your while."
"It had better be very worth our while, just in case someone figures it out. When your commanding officer is also your father*, the possibilities for punishment expand dramatically."
"Sir, I'm not sure whether the Commander would kill us for doing this or kill us for not doing it."
"Okay, okay, okay," said il Wedrei. "Maybe I'm being premature. I mean, I don't even know if you can do it."
"Oh, we can do it, all right," the blue gunner replied. "What we'd need is a big explosion, from which your breather would be recovered without you." Glau corpses did not retain the invulnerability of living Glau. If a Glau died from lack of air, the corpse could be destroyed as easily as any non-superpowered body. "Then you'd need some way to get your living self and functioning breather away from the explosion undetected..." The rest of the ride was taken up with the technical details of the deception. They didn't talk any more about what ir Wedrei would do to reward the pair, but he doubted that was important anymore. Amnang was already excited by the act of plotting. He'd want to do it, just to see if it worked, and he'd get Menang to go along.
Once they were inside the repair bay of the support ship, ir Wedrei was technically a prisoner of war, but no special effort was made to restrain him. What would have been called in English a gentlemen's agreement among the fighter crews of all sides (although the Colna fleet had not a single male and the Opuulu split the difference) made the atmosphere on the support ships very easygoing. Prisoner-of-war status was always brief and was regarded as a kind of unscheduled vacation. As repair bots clustered around the two smaller spacecraft, the Ilus and ir Wedrei floated away together, chatting as if the Glau were an invited guest rather than a captured enemy, though they were careful to stick to innocuous topics.
They dropped "down" a hatch that led to the mess, where there was both food and pseudogravity. They were standing outside the mess hall (Menang in a service-issue mechanical body that had four limbs with equal grasping capability, allowing the piscene better-than-humanoid dexterity in free fall, plus the ability to stand and walk on two legs in a gravity field) looking at the menu screen on the wall, when a comm bot floated up to Amnang, opened to show him its screen, and announced that he had a call from Director Nayha of CSRS. He and Menang looked at each other with wide eyes, then turned back to the screen. Nayha was already visible. Flanking her, as Menang flanked Amnang, was one of the most famous faces in the sector: the Earth woman. What an interesting color her eyes were.
"Captains Ilu Amnang and Menang, you are officially notified of your selection for the expedition to research the newly discovered civilization in Ansarit Sector and possibly to make first contact." Amnang smiled first, widely and excitedly, catching his breath. Menang clearly began with a moment of disbelief, and his smile, when it came, was tinged with wonder. "Departure is scheduled for approximately one year from now. You will accompany and support this young lady, who-"
"Have you got a Glau yet?" Amnang interrupted. "We'll need a Glau, and I have just the man right here. Dri!" The little Yi#vi drew ir Wedrei into camera range. "Here he is, Colonel Adrinoch ir Wedrei. You've got to choose him."
"Colonel ir Wedrei, you were next on my call list," said the blue woman. "I just spoke to Commander il Daniikyen and he has started the process of reassignment. Welcome to the team."
Ir Wedrei groped for the polite response as his emotions chased one another; dismay at the wreck (or at least severe delaying) of his plans, satisfaction that at least he'd be out of the fleet and done with battle for a good long time, and envy of the Ilus, who were behind him holding hands, dancing in a circle, while Amnang chanted "We're going! We're going! We're going!" and Menang laughed wildly. As soon as the pleasantries were finished and the screen went blank, they pulled him into the circle. Lead by one Ilu, pushed by the other, forced out of politeness to join in their dance, he found himself beginning to be infected by their mood, thinking This might not be so bad after all.
On CSRS, Roxanne turned to Nayha and asked "Why do I think my first leadership challenge is going to be keeping Ilu Amnang from taking over the expedition?"
"Probably because your judgment is sound. Let's call Clan Reii. After this, recruiting a planetologist should be relatively simple."