But suppose people are neither aware of any cherished values nor experience any threat? That is the experience of indifference, which, if it seems to involve all their values, becomes apathy. Suppose, finally, they are unaware of any cherished values, but still are very much aware of a threat? That is the experience of uneasiness, of anxiety, which, if it is total enough, becomes a deadly unspecified malaise. - - The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills

Aiken

I'm not anything close to smart, but I do know a Namekjin when I smell one. I ought to. I spent enough time around them back when I was littler, back in the bad old days.

I wasn't wanted. I was my Mistress's - Frost had seen to that - but she didn't want me. She wanted her old guards back, faithless though they'd shown themselves to be. When Furiza got wind of how strong those two were, and asked them if they wouldn't rather work for him instead, Butta and Jeice had jumped at the offer without so much as backward glance or a by your leave for my Mistress. As the years went by we'd hear about them every now and then; they were just having a great old time, making asses of themselves in public while showboating their way through the dirtiest of work. The universe's deadliest, lamest joke.

I wasn't there then, so I couldn't say if it was ambition or fear that led them to jump so quickly when Furiza called. Frost told the story differently than Uragiru did, and my Mistress saw it a third way. The important thing wasn't why they'd been so fast to turn away from her, but that Furiza had taken them. "It's beyond tolerance," she told Frost again, not a week after he'd first brought me on to the ship. "He squanders his talent pool, and robs me of my own when he finds that he's come up short."

They'd been great finds, those two. Butta and Jeice. Because they were mutants, and that meant that they were really - really - strong. That sort of strong rarely came natural, not to most races. The trick was to find the couple-few mutants who were really worth something from among the billions of no accounts. My Mistress's family was always looking.

Way back then Frost had been well, but there still hadn't been much bulk to him. He was all lank and length and sharp corners, and when he spread out across the furniture he sprawled in all directions. He was off ship so often - down on one planet or another, where daytime kept its own hours - that he never slept regular. I'd hear him walking the halls at night, bypassing the kitchen staff to raid the pantry or reading files in the bridge. He had been working on a nap when my Mistress spoke. His eyes came open slowly as he raised his head to look at her. "There's truth to what's being said, then?" he asked.

"I don't know anything more about it than you do," my Mistress said, and probably she knew even less than that. My Mistress made it her business not to know, but Frost always seemed to have heard about things before they'd even happened. Still, even he'd been blindsided when Vegetasei blew up.

But after a pause my Mistress scoffed, "An asteroid, honestly."

"It did seem exceedingly unlikely," Frost said.

My Mistress dropped down into her throne, folding her legs back neatly. From my place beside the great seat I watched her tail drape itself over the arm of the throne, its tip lashing. I was smaller then, barely taller than my Mistress, though some heavier, and sitting up there had still put her high above me. When I'd first come aboard I'd been afraid that her tail might hit me by mistake, but it hadn't taken too long to figure out that she was always aware of what it was doing, no matter what. Sometimes she might break things by accident, but never people. She didn't like to hit, and she never did hit me. My Mistress wasn't physical. Even when she killed she did it at a distance.

"It is an astonishingly uncreative lie," my Mistress said. She fidgeted discontentedly in the throne. Pressed a shoulder against its high back. Leaned forward, elbow on the armrest, jaw cradled in the back of her hand, knuckles against chin and cheek. Then she was up again, circling the room.

The Saiyajin were different from most races, because the Saiyajin were almost always passable strong - not mutant strong, but strong enough to come in awful handy when you had a lot of them. Nobody had liked the Saiyajin - they were stupid proud, near impossible to work with, and notorious for turning on their comrades - but they'd do dirty work and they'd do it willingly and on the cheap, and that had made them deadly useful. Most everyone agreed that Furiza had put them down, but nobody really understood why, and that made my Mistress horribly nervous. She didn't like it when he did senseless or unexpected things. Nobody did. Everybody liked to pretend that they were special or needed or well-liked, and that that made them safe, but nobody could ever really know with someone as changeable as he was.

"He'll never be able to keep pace with Koola without the Saiyajin working the front for him," she said grimly. "And I'll be the one to suffer for it when he begins to feel ineffectual."

Frost was still for a moment. When he spoke again it was to turn the conversation back to its original topic. "I understand that Butta and Jeice have been recruited by Ginyu. Isn't that true?" He looked to Uragiru for confirmation.

"That's the word," Uragiru had said. Back then, Uragiru had known nearly everyone who was important enough to be worth knowing, and that was useful because all of them were forever telling her things. That ended after the Super Saiyajin came - everyone who'd been important when Furiza was alive died on Nameksei or soon after - but Frost kept her anyway. Frost liked her. "Sauza has Ginyu in a rage," she went on. "He's come up with two new men who aren't to be believed. Rumor has it that they're not just a match for anyone Ginyu has, but better than Ginyu himself. "

"Of course," my Mistress had snapped. "They divide the best between themselves and leave me with the dregs. As ever it's been." Back then my Mistress had been like a thing meant to prowl locked in too small a cage. Her talent for spite was astonishing, her rages unpredictable and directed at ever shifting targets. There was a lot of space outside the ship - all the space there was - but she was trapped just the same, and the rest of us with her. I was an irritant, and stayed out of the way as best as I knew how. I didn't want to make things any harder for her than they already were.

I knew that it was best if I stayed quiet. I knew that, but I couldn't help it. "I'll be stronger than they ever were," I promised her. "I'll work harder than they even knew how, and I'll be stronger, and one's going to ever be able to take me away because I'll just lay down and die first." Then - stupid, tripping over my own earnest tongue - I said, "I'll be the strongest one that there is."

Frost winced. Uragiru's eyes got wider than I thought they could. She raised a hand to her mouth, then dropped it back to her side quickly and went flat faced.

My Mistress came to a sudden stop in front of the port window, her shoulders drawing together as the muscles in her neck went rigid. She was still for a long time, and everyone else was still with her, waiting to see what she would do. I didn't know what to do, and tried to catch someone's eye so I could be told, but Frost was focused completely on my Mistress, and Uragiru wouldn't look at me. I'd lost all my words and couldn't find a one of them. My Mistress's head turned toward me very slowly. "Never," she said, her voice low and strained and dangerous, "Never say anything like that again."

"I didn't mean stronger than you," I rushed to say. "Not that."

I wanted her attention. I wanted to be told what to do - what she needed me to do for her - so that I could do it and do it well so that she would see that I had done it well for her. But when she looked at me it was hard not to shake. I was a frustration and a burden to her, too young and too senseless do anything right. Seeing me twisted her up with a dozen contradictory impulses, more thoughts and feelings than I had names for. I didn't mean to - I never meant to - but somehow I made her feel bad about herself. The relief when she turned away was disappointing and empty.

But I did get stronger than Butta and Jeice were, though by then both of them were long dead. I fought everything that I could get to fight me, and I damn near kicked it a few times when things got too hot, but I got stronger than anyone ever thought I could rightly get. Frost always thought I'd be something, but I think I surprised him, too. It took years and years, but I did it. I don't lie, not to my Mistress.

When my Mistress spoke again it only left me more confused about where I'd gone wrong. "You are a walking invitation for manufactured insult," she said. "Under no circumstances will you allow yourself to be seen by him. Do you understand me?" I didn't know much, but I knew who he was alright. Nobody didn't. I nodded, though it seemed very wrong to me that she should be left to face a clear threat alone.

My Mistress had turned her back again. She drew her tail close, coiling it around her ankles. Drew herself into herself. Drew away from the rest of us. There was something scary about it, so much more frightening than any display of tempter or pique. Behind me, I heard Frost move to his feet. Out the corner of my eye I saw Uragiru take two short steps backward. They weren't stupid, not either of them. If she could pull herself that far away from us – from him – then there was always the chance that she just wouldn't come back. Frost did as he did, but there was never nothing that said that we'd be able to keep her with us. She was so good at making herself not care.

"I have been in error," she said. "I should have brought his attention to those men immediately upon realizing their talent. I will need to make it up to him." The ship back then had been the sort with the big, outwardly bulging windows. Tinted, they reflected her face back distorted, but there wasn't anything there that I could read. The rest of the universe had been frozen out. She didn't turn to look at Frost when said, "If you wish to keep your Namekjin you need to relocate them immediately."

When Frost stiffed his spine he gained half a foot's height. His expression was as carefully fixed and flat as my Mistress's, but he wasn't nearly as good at hiding things away as she was. He shook. There was never any question that he cared for my Mistress, but sometimes I think maybe he wished that he didn't have to. Sometimes he wanted to hit her, she made him so angry. If he ever had I would have killed him. He would have been dead before he knew that he was dying. His commitment to every sorry case he ran across might have pulled in a hundred different ways, but I only had one priority. "That isn't…" he began, and then, stymied in his attempts to find a gracious way to argue by some urgency, he just said, "No."

It was not a right thing to say – it wasn't given to him to tell her "no," not in matters of state, not back then – but it knocked her back down with us. It left her blinking uneasily, caught between shock and anger, but when she spoke she did so lightly, as though it were a thing of little importance. "I should have thought you'd be pleased with the choice; the matter's bloodless enough. The creatures are few in number. You should be able to remove the lot without difficulty."

"I need that planet," he said.

Planets were a point of annoyance for my Mistress. It mystified and annoyed her that her family and Frost were so interested in entangling themselves in the lives of deaths of so many worlds and races. Caught off balance by his continued resistance, she tried again to make the thing frivolous. "What wish could you possibly have for a planet like that one?"

Her back was still to them. Frost looked ready to speak – he lifted a hand, then paused, indecisive. Uragiru caught his eye, and when he tilted his head to look down at her she shook her own emphatically. Frost smiled to reassure her; she was not comforted. She looked at him with tight-jawed horror, her head still going back and forth.

Turn around, I wanted to say. You're missing something important. But I didn't dare it. My Mistress never saw anything she didn't wish to see, and she never wanted to see anything that she couldn't hope to control. Frost and Uragiru had their hands in so much, and my Mistress turned a willfully blind eye to all their projects.

"There's the operative word," he began. "The Namekjin-"

"Oh never mind if you're going to make a lecture out of it," she said with airy indifference. Back then worlds fell like pieces on a game board. It wasn't a game that my Mistress could hope to win – the deck was stacked so that Furiza would always win and he would win by just as many pieces as he wanted to – so she opted out. She didn't play. Frost could have his little tries, because Frost was inconspicuous and beneath notice anyway, and because Frost knew how to lose. But my Mistress refused to allow herself to become attached to anything that would only be taken for her in the next round.

"The thing's entirely too perverse," she said, teasing him now, trying to make a small joke out of the thing so it could be put aside. There was so much that could have gotten between my Mistress and Frost if they had allowed it, so much mistrust and misunderstanding. Frost would put it aside, and my Mistress would simply pretend that it wasn't there. But ignored, smoothed over, denied, it was still a fact; they had almost nothing in common. "All the time you've been spending down there with those mud hut primitives. You'll catch something if you aren't more careful."

Frost had gone crazy for those greenies when he finally found them, and had personally put a huge amount of work into taming them down. Teaching natives to speak proper was usually the duty of field academics, but on Nameksei Frost hadn't wanted to bring in anyone else. It was just him and Uragiru, and the two of them would be down there for days at a time. Sometimes I went too, when my Mistress was especially fed up with me having me underfoot. They weren't bad people, those Namekjin – there were always a few that were game for a spar, and their kids were just as cute as cute came – but talking like that was beneath Frost and Uragiru both. It wasn't right that they lowered themselves to speaking the Namekjin tongue – they should have been speak like us – but Frost wouldn't have a translator between himself and them. It didn't take long before he and Uragiru and all the Namekjin were speaking a mishmash of the two tongues, but Frost didn't stop until there was fluency in both directions. He didn't want any misunderstandings between himself and the Namekjin.

The matter of Nameksei didn't end there, though it would have if Frost had been acting reasonable. Frost was almost always the one to blink first when he and my Mistress locked horns, but he got his way with Nameksei in the end, for all the good it did him. Whatever he'd been working at, it didn't end the way he'd wanted. He and Uragiru came back from their last extended stay on Nameksei drained and dejected and very, very quiet.

And that was the last that I heard of Nameksei, until a good twenty-five years later, when Furiza himself went there. No one really knew what happened while he was on Nameksei, because Furiza was the only one who lived to tell, and Furiza was a liar. He lied all the time. He lied about what happened to Vegetasei, and he lied about killing Prince Vegeta, because Vegeta's here on Earth with Son Goku.

He couldn't have not known that we'd been there before him. Frost had left his mark all over the planet, in the novelties and bits of tech he'd given the Namekjin to get on their good side, and in the memories of the Namekjin themselves. How else would they know our language unless someone had been there to teach them? The Namekjin men were big and fierce as demons, but the women were small and squat and wrinkly, and nowhere near as bold. All of them would do anything to ensure the safety of their children. Getting the Namekjin to tell everything would have been as simple as just making one of the little guys scream loud enough.

So Furiza knew that Frost was there before him, and that Frost had known about something that Furiza would have wanted long before Furiza found out about it on his own, but Frost hadn't said. Frost had kept it secret, so Furiza didn't get the thing either, but he did get hurt bad in the process of trying. So that was Frost's fault because he hadn't told what he knew. And that made it my Mistress's fault, too, as little as she'd actually had to do with any of it, because Frost was hers. So after Nameksei blew up we were on the run, and we were in hiding, and we had to be very careful for a long time. Until we could be sure that all three of them were dead and gone.

Frost and my Mistress were so worried that the Super Saiyajin wasn't finished, that he'd come looking for her and who knew what else, that it was a long time before they noticed how much better things had gotten between them.