Free Final Inquiries by Roger MacBride Allen Page A

group is far more important. If I asked you who you were, you might say, 'I am Hannah Wolfson, Senior Special Agent of the BSI,' and leave it at that, and not even bother to say you were human, as that would be assumed. Greveltra would say 'I am of the Vixa, of the planet Tifinda, Founder's Pillar Clanline, of the rank SubPilot,' and might not even mention his name, thinking it unimportant.
    "My point is that a collectivist species places very different values on things. Status of the group is important, but not individual status. A human or Kendari might want a large house or an important-sounding title to demonstrate his or her own wealth or value. A Vixan wouldn't bother much with that--but would want to work with others to build the biggest, grandest city or spacecraft or whatever to demonstrate the power and wealth of the group.
    "You and I would see a huge, gleaming, near-empty Column City as a waste of resources that could have gone to improving the well-being of individuals. Greveltra would regard that same empty city as a worthy investment in staking out the territory of the Clanline, and in denying those resources to the competition. Those goals are not alien to your people or mine, of course--but the Vixa emphasize the group to such an extent, and downplay the individual so much, as to be quite jarring to Kendari--and humans. And many other species, for that matter."
    Jamie glanced back at Greveltra. Had the SubPilot even heard Brox? Would he even care what a mere non-Vixan said or thought? But if Greveltra was a relatively low-ranking Vixan who could safely regard mere Younger Race types as beneath his interest--how did he square that with the frantic urgency of the effort he himself was expending to get those same Younger Race types to where they were going? Didn't the importance of their mission--whatever it was--confer any sort of status to them?
    "Now at programmed and authorized station-keeping point," Greveltra announced. "Preparing for separation of vehicles."
    "This is where everything starts to happen very quickly," said Brox.
    Before Jamie or Hannah could ask what he meant, Jamie felt an odd, shivering vibration course through his body, a sensation he recognized as a new acceleration-compensation field powering up. He suddenly understood what Greveltra had meant by vehicle separation.
    Just then, the world--or at least the command sphere--began to turn upside down. Their view of Tifinda rolled away, to be replaced with a view down the shaft they had ridden before. Three lines of running lights came on, and Jamie could see some sort of mechanical motion far down the shaft. It looked as if something was retracting into the side wall. He realized it was the portal tube that had transferred them sideways between this vertical shaft and the one that they had been in originally.
    With the way clear, he could see that the shaft they were in was a straight drop that went a lot farther down than he had realized.
    There came a bang and a thud --but no sense of vibration or motion--and they were sliding down to the base of the shaft. The command sphere had rotated through a hundred and eighty degrees. They were looking straight up toward where down had been moments before--and they were moving toward it at an alarming rate of speed.
    "I do not understand the process completely, but in essence the shaft we are traveling in right now will serve as a form of linear accelerator, using the interference patterns between the sphere's acceleration compensator and that of the propulsion module to throw us forward at great speed. The command sphere is inverted to maximize the desired interference reaction."
    "Like a bullet out of a gun," said Jamie as the sphere hurtled to the end of the shaft. "First they have to load us into the chamber." They stopped with a boom and a thud. There was still not the slightest physical sensation of the command sphere moving at all, a stillness that was completely at odds with the sounds of