Early Byrd Page 2

is Rapput, an Ocrevennar of the Clan of Gonther. Currently he's the highest-ranking Artemu on Earth by both bloodline and official position and was the architect of their victory over us." He turned to Rapput. "Sir, these are my sons Robert and Timothy."

  We bowed deeply. "Ocrevennar" meant "Blood Cousin or Closer to the Emperor".

  "An honor to m-meet you, sir," I managed to stammer out.

  He smiled again. "They're even more alike than I expected. How delightful! Our kind never bears more than a single offspring at a time."

  "Robert and Timmy are no more closely related genetically than any other pair of brothers," Dad explained, as he had before to many other curious Artemu. "You see, there's more than one kind of—"

  "Of course!" Rapput interrupted, still smiling. "But to us, this is wonderful enough. Such strong and tall young hunters! Their academic scores are excellent as well, and of course their bloodline is beyond reproach—one of your world's finest." His smile faded. "No further investigation is necessary. We'll take them."

  Dad's face went tight and dead-cold for an instant. Then his eyes went even harder. I hadn't seen him like that since the War. "Of course," he replied eventually, though I could tell his words were forced. "The American, uh . . . clan is deeply honored."

  Rapput's smile widened. He stepped over and placed one of his hands on top of each of our heads. "Comenche egla?" he asked.

  "Rart!" I replied, bowing at the neck and clasping my hands.

  "Enning en hammena!" Tim added, adopting the Posture of Youth Earnestly Seeking Instruction as well.

  "Wonderful!" the alien repeated. "You've even taught them our language, and without much of an accent at that! Such foresight!" He smiled again. "You humans were indeed worthy enemies in time of war. I can only dimly imagine what vast reaches our kinds might someday conquer by working together." He cupped our skulls again. "I swear to you upon my ancestor's graves that these two shall be given the opportunity to stand among the first and foremost and afforded every opportunity to make their names shine for all eternity in the Hall of Honor. Our success in this is key to everything that shall come after. Your blood shall be our blood, and our blood yours. Thus states the Treaty, thus shall be done." He bowed.

  Dad, still pale, returned the bow. "The Treaty shall be honored," was his only reply.

  Rapput smile faded at that, but it was soon back in place. He turned to face we boys. "We'll leave in the morning. This will be difficult for you in the short run, I'm fully aware. Our own offspring aren't so different from human children. You'll miss your parents, your clan, your whole way of living. In order to help you along, you'll be permitted the unconditional privilege of sending and receiving letters from home regularly. You may also bring along any reasonable amount of luggage and personal items. Please make sure that you include any and all weapons with which you're proficient. We recognize that your anatomy and biology differs from our own, and at least in the beginning and perhaps beyond you'll be allowed to use that with which you're familiar. Heaven only knows that your kind create effective weapons!"

  Dad still wasn't smiling, so I was sort of afraid to speak up. But Tim wasn't. "I . . . Sir, I don’t understand."

  "It's the Treaty, Tim," Dad answered, though it sounded as if the words were being ripped from his throat. "We signed it, and now we must obey it. All the more because I'm a congressman, I fear. There's no getting around it."

  "What about the Treaty?" I finally asked. "What does it have to do with Tim and me?"

  Dad closed his eyes for a moment, and then squatted down to address us on our own level. "A lot of things," he finally explained. "More than most people anywhere understand yet. But in your cases . . ." He took in a deep, ragged breath then released it. "For you two, it means that you, along with a few others from other important nations on Earth, have to go live on Artemis and be raised as Artemu."

  "But why?" Timmy asked. His voice quavered, and I felt my eyes filling with tears. This wasn't a good thing to do in front of an alien—I made two fists and somehow forced the liquid back through sheer willpower.

  "You're to become hostages," Rapput explained, still smiling. "Or at least that's the closest word in your language I'm aware of. It's not an accurate translation of the concept."

  "Hostages?" I asked, ignoring the Artemesian and looking deep into Dad's eyes. "But . . ."

  "He's right when he says the word's not a perfect match," Dad explained, though he had to turn away. "Because we put up such a fight they want us to become more like mercenaries—or perhaps even partners—than a conquered people. Eventually, that is.”

  "Absolutely!" Rapput added. "More than anything! There's no reason why our kinds shouldn't get along splendidly, once we develop a sense of mutual respect and understanding. And you two . . ." He reached out and laid his hands on our heads again; apparently the gesture was meaningful to him in a way I didn't understand. ". . . have been selected from the most noble youths of your entire clan to be adopted by my own!"

  I blinked again. "Adopted?"

  He nodded. "And raised to become Artemu nobles, equal in almost every way with our biological children. Thus in time we shall bind our worlds and our peoples and become in essence one, far stronger and more powerful together than the sum of our parts. The universe shivers in terror of this day, in fear of the glory that our kinds working together shall surely win."

  He spread his arms wide in what looked like a benediction on Tim and I. "You two are the luckiest boys on Earth!"

  3

  Dad didn't agree about our being so lucky, of course. And Mom even less so. "Do not tell me I have to feed that . . . that fiend at our family table!” she hissed. “Not when he's going to . . . to . . ."

  "Easy, babe," Dad said, reassuring her with a hug. "We have no choice in the matter. You understand that." He kissed her gently, even though we could all see he was hurting as badly as she was. "We're a strong family. We'll see this through, somehow. Now . . . Yes, I fear we do indeed have to serve the bastard a good meal. The best we can offer, in fact, with a smile. In honor not of him but our own children. It may be their last home-cooking for a long time to come."

  Mom pulled away from the embrace at that, then softened and nodded. "For them," she agreed. "Not him." Then she hugged each of us again for maybe the third time in an hour and marched off to the kitchen, head high.

  "Dad," I finally had time to ask. "What . . . I mean . . ."

  He looked at the floor, then went to his favorite chair, the one under the stuffed head of a Boone and Crockett mountain goat he'd bagged before Tim and I were born. "I never wanted for us to sign that damned treaty," he muttered as if we weren't there. Then he closed his eyes and leaned way back. "But we had no choice. Only total fools would've fought on any further. They controlled space, you see. We could fight off their landing parties—did fight them off every single time, in fact, though the cost was horrible. But once they threatened to start dropping rocks on us, well . . ."

  "Rocks?" Timothy asked. Clearly he was as bewildered as I was. "Rocks can't hurt tanks. Or fighter planes."

  Dad smiled and gestured for us to climb on his lap. It'd been a long time since we'd done that; by now we were far too big. But it seemed right then and there, somehow.

  "Big enough rocks can," he explained. "Especially when they fall all the way from the Moon or so. In fact, they can wreck entire planets. But by then the Artemu wanted to take us intact, you see. And they wanted it bad."

  "Why?" I asked.

  "Because of the way we kept fighting them off," Dad explained. "Again and again and again. They tried landing in Kansas City first, but they'd never seen anything like an Abrams tank before, or a stealth aircraft." He smiled. "They didn’t invent Chobham armor or work out the equations that can make an airplane invisible to radar. We Americans tossed their asses right back off the planet."

  Tim and I both nodded. Dad had won an important decoration called the Medal of Courage or something like that at Kansa
s City. Supposedly he was the main reason we won the battle without taking even worse losses than we did, and that was also part of why he was a congressman now. Americans appreciated their heroes more than ever these days.

  "Then the Japanese did the same, and next the Koreans. So the Artemu tried to land on Madagascar to establish a base we'd have a hard time getting to, and then freaked out when we all worked together and beat them there as well." His eyes flashed; he'd been at Madagascar as well, and had gotten caught in a fallout pattern. We'd grown up knowing he still might die any time from it. "It was only then that the Artemu even considered negotiating. They hadn't negotiated a peace in living memory. Their way is to conquer and dominate, not to co-exist."

  "But . . ." Tim asked, shifting position. The chair was much too crowded to be comfortable. "Why didn't they just ruin Earth with rocks then, like you said?"

  "For anyone else, they would've," Dad explained. "But we impressed them, you see. In a way that no other enemy since their own unification wars has. They never once broke a human high-level code that we know of, while we decrypted their stuff almost at will toward the end. And when we nuked our own territory, with our own troops still in the blast zone, they began to respect us by the only standards they value. The truth is that given equal technology, especially in terms of space drives, we'd