Rogue Powers by Roger MacBride Allen Page B

have a familiar face around. Still, there wasn't much for Metcalf and him to do.
    Metcalf took a long pull at his drink. They had been cooling their heels, with little to contribute, for close to ten months now. The war had dragged to a halt for lack of an enemy to fight.
    And all they had to work with were the prisoners, and the prisoners didn't talk much. When they did talk, it turned out they didn't know much. The Intelligence officers didn't seem to mind. As far as Metcalf could see, most of them saw interrogating the prisoners as a career choice with good job security, rather than as a temporary assignment. They went gaily on, asking the same things again and again, charting responses, correlating results, writing summaries of evidence that were longer than the evidence itself. Metcalf could almost sympathize with the Intelligence team. These were the only enemy troops they were going to milk the chance for all it was worth.
    But all that to one side, there was no progress whatsoever on the central question: Where is Capital?
    The Guardian leadership, very wisely as things turned out, had practically made astronomy a state secret. None of the prisoners had ever seen a star chart. None of them even knew there were grid reference systems to locate stars relative to each other. None of them knew that stars were differing sizes and colors. It made asking where their sun was, or what mass and spectral class it was, a stunningly futile undertaking.
    As Metcalf was fond of pointing out, rarely had so few who knew so little been asked so much by so many for so long. When he said that to George, George replied, "So what?"
    Metcalf didn't have an answer for that. He ordered another double Scotch.

CHAPTER SEVEN   Chralray Village: the Current Nihilist Camp
    D'eltipa had a great desire to be found anywhere but where she was. But it was this village, that they had tarried in for far too long, and this hall, and this time, and she had no choice but to meet with her First Advice, Nihilist M'etallis. D'eltipa found irony in M'etallis's title. As Primary Guidance of the Nihilists, she had never accepted a syllable of M'etallis's advice. And now M'etallis would succeed her. M'etallis would be the one to deal with the halfwalkers.
    The aliens, strange as they were, strange as they had to be, represented so much change and renewal to come— they were hope itself—and yet they could not have brought their remarkable flying-carrying machines down out of the sky at a worse time. Even without the halfwalkers, the situation would be explosive. And the halfwalkers, weird creatures that they were, represented infinite complication. No one had made sense of them yet. The aliens seemed to have no desire to go anywhere. And they did things in such strange ways. D'eltipa found herself forced to believe the reports of the learners, but she still found it fantastic that such a complex thing as a spacecraft was built and not grown. Perhaps, the learners suggested, it was actually impossible to grow one, or grow the parts of one to be assembled. Something about stresses and pressure and heat. The halfwalkers could build those things and yet seemed to have no skill of biology at all. Strange indeed.
    She felt her mind straying, and almost allowed it down the side path. But the humans, as they called themselves, were not the central problem, though M'etallis no doubt had schemes already that involved them. M'etallis herself was the problem—a problem just waiting to happen. No, that was too gentle. M'etallis was a disaster impatient to happen. And D'eltipa could see no way that would keep M’etallis from the post of Primary Guidance. D'eltipa had even given up her hopes for a splitting of the path, of disciples of her Guidance being there to start anew down the correct course after she was a suicide or had been Divided from her people. And that time would be soon. She understood fully that she should have surrendered Guidance and taken her own life