Flight of the Gazebo

Chapter 9 - Spies

He stiffened when he heard the voices in his head, but since he didn't smell or see anyone nearby, he continued with his odd compulsion to investigate the gazebo ruins.

A breeze wafted an especially interesting scent towards him and he followed it to where three beams converged at ground level. He thrust his nose into the space between the blackened members and sniffed, drawing the smells deep into his nasal cavity. There were at least fourteen different shades of aroma he could distinguish straight away.

He sniffed again. There was no mistaking it, some of the smells came from a cat. This was going to keep him busy.

******

"What in Hollow is going on?" said Ranthar. "I can't make head or tail of it. It feels like I'm seeing odours." It flicked a switch on the machine and both courtiers removed their headpieces.

"Hem. Maybe the, ah, human is just too alien for us," said Lungwil.

"It can't be. We were able to make sense of our hostage's senses while we transported it here. How can the two aliens be so different?"

"Of course, it could be in a different, ah, state, so to speak," said Lungwil, steepling the fingers of his four hands and settling himself back in his chair.

"What are you talking about?"

"Switching modes of consciousness. Not just a change of senses, but the entire way of thinking. Like the, ah, slat-beings in the Hogworn quarter. You know, the way they change from some sort of, ah, grub, to a slatted, bipedal thing. Hem. But the strange thing is the way their entire viewpoint of the world changes. When they're grubs their entire sensory input comes through their skin by some sort of chemical process, but when they mature they gain eyes which become their predominant sense. Much like us. Hem." It considered for a moment then said, "I mean, much like our eyes are our predominant sense, not that we only gain eyes when we mature. Or that we grow slats, for that matter."

"I know what you meant. Why can't you just say what you mean without explaining it a hundred different ways? Honestly, how you ever came to be a member of Zharvak's court, I'll never know."

"What makes you think you're so perfect? Hem? Nothing has gone right with your plan since it began."

"Our plan! You've been fully a part of it every step of the way. And it isn't our plan that's gone awry, it's that events have occurred that no-one could have predicted. I mean, did you have any inkling that Bakalwe would be crushed by an alien town materialising right where he was standing? He was supposed to be testing his portal. Which, incidentally, I now believe was actually an Interstitial Travel Device - I mean ITD - despite what he told us."

"Why would he have lied to us about what he was building?"

"For the same reasons we lied to him about how we'd make sure he got all the credit for his invention."

"What difference does it make whether he was building a portal or an ITD?" said Lungwil. It rubbed its forehead.

"Because an ITD is vastly more powerful. Bakalwe claimed a portal would give us the ability to jump about inside Hollow from one place to the next in the blink of an eye. But an ITD gives us the means to jump to anywhere in the universe! It enables us to leave Hollow! The point is that when Bakalwe was killed, all his secret research - sponsored by us at not inconsiderable risk and expense, I might add - were gone in an instant. The moment he tested his experimental device the humans turned up and squashed him flat, taking out not only the only person capable of making an ITD but also the only prototype we had.

"What I've done is adapted our plan to the circumstances. We've lost Bakalwe and his prototype, but gained a fully functioning, ITD and a bunch of humans who know how it works. All we have to do is gain that device for ourselves - once it's been repaired - then we can take us and anything else we want away from here to our own planets, the places we should have been born on instead of inside this festering sphere."