Free Asgard's Conquerors by Brian Stableford Page A

biological
work to become a liaison man with the UN nabobs. I couldn't help wondering what
Dr. Ayub Khan's attitude would have been had the UN sent him orders to forget
Uranus and go to Asgard as a diplomat.
    When the haggling was over (Valdavia carefully refrained from giving us
the details) the colonel, Crucero, and I went over with him to the Tetron ship
so that we could find out what it was that Earth and Tetra expected of us in
the line of duty. The Tetrax, with their usual sharp eye for formality,
confronted us with their own committee of four.
    One of them, I already knew very slightly. His name was 74-Scarion, and
he'd been an officer with immigration control. He'd been the one who'd
contrived to get me involved with Myrlin in the first place. He was very much
the junior member of the Tetron team, though, and had presumably been included
because he and I had already met.
    The other three announced themselves as 994-Tulyar, 871-Alpheus, and 1125-Camina.
673-Nisreen wasn't present. Camina was a female, though it wouldn't have been
obvious if she hadn't taken the trouble to tell us. All Tetrax have round
faces, wizened features, and black skin with a highly-polished look to it. They
do have hair, of a sort, but it's black and very short, and doesn't differ in
length or style between individuals. Their dress is unisex and they don't seem
to make any attempt to adopt small tokens of individuation. You can tell one
from another by the shapes of their noses and the patterns of the markings on
their faces, but it isn't easy. They profess a horror of excessive
individuation, which is why they give themselves numbers as well as names. I
never had figured out whether the names they had were more akin to our
Christian or family names, or what kind of relationship was likely to exist between
two Tetrax with the same name. I did know, though, that high numbers were in
some loose way connected with high status. Four-figure numbers were rare, and
it wasn't surprising that 1125-Camina turned out to be the chief spokesman.
    "We are most honoured and very grateful for your willingness to
assist us in this tragic hour," she assured us. "This is a time of
trouble for all the galactic community, and I know of no homeworld which does
not mourn for lost sons and daughters. The Asgard project was one that brought
together all races in a common endeavour, and was therefore precious to us all
as a symbol of harmony. These have been dreadful happenings."
    All of this tripped very smoothly from her tongue in pangalactic
parole, which is a language perfectly suited to Tetron mouth-parts. Human
tongues, which are flatter and wider, can't quite get to grips with the full
range of syllables, and the fact that we have to substitute a couple of nonstandard
consonants means that we sound very awkward when we try to use the language. Alas,
there's no other way to get by in the community. One could hardly expect the
Tetrax to learn English.
    For this reason, Valdavia's official reply to the greeting was more
succinct than his natural inclination would have prompted him to be, and the
words did not flow like verbal honey.
    "We regret," 1125-Camina explained, speaking directly to the
colonel because Valdavia had presumably already heard the news, "that we
have been unable to establish communication with the people who have seized
Skychain City. There is, of course, a language barrier, but no attempt seems to
have been made by the invaders to begin the work of overcoming it. Our
transmissions are ignored. We have sent down unarmed emissaries, but none have
returned, although we have no evidence that any of them has been harmed. There
are still galactics beneath the surface who have not yet been captured—people
who were working in bubble-domes established by the Co-ordinated Research
Establishment. We have been able to communicate sporadically with these
groups, though we are wary of attracting attention to them. We did manage to
receive communications from