Faded Sun 02 – Cherryh, C. J.

Shonjir

By

C.J. Cherryh

 

Elsie Wollheim… for being Elsie

 

The Faded Sun Triology Book 2

 

Contents

 

Chapter One 3

Chapter Two 18

Chapter Three 30

Chapter Four 36

Chapter Five 42

Chapter Six 47

Chapter Seven 54

Chapter Eight 62

Chapter Nine 69

Chapter Ten 74

Chapter Eleven 79

Chapter Twelve 88

Chapter Thirteen 96

Chapter Fourteen 101

Chapter Fifteen 109

Chapter Sixteen 116

Chapter Seventeen 119

Chapter Eighteen 125

Chapter Nineteen 128

Chapter Twenty 137

Chapter Twenty-One 147

Chapter Twenty-Two 157

 

 

Chapter One

 

THE MRI was still sedated. They kept him that way constantly, dazed and bewildered at this place that echoed of human voices and strange machinery.

 

Sten Duncan came to stand at the mri’s bedside as he did twice each day, under the eye of the security officer who stood just outside the windowed partition. He came to see Niun, permitted to do so because he was the only one of all at Kesrith base that knew him. Today there was a hazy awareness in the golden, large-irised eyes. Duncan fancied the look there to be one of reproach.

 

Niun had lost weight. His golden skin was marked in many places with healing wounds, stark and angry. He had fought and won a battle for life which, fully conscious, he would surely have refused to win; but Niun remained ignorant of the humans who came and went about him, the scientists who, in concert with his physicians, robbed him of dignity.

 

They were enemies of mankind, the mri. Forty years of war, of ruined worlds and dead numbered by the millions and yet most humans had never seen the enemy. Fewer still had looked upon a mri’s living and unveiled face.

 

They were a beautiful people, tall and slim and golden beneath their black robes: golden manes streaked with bronze, delicate, humanoid features, long, slender hands; their ears had a little tuft of pale down at the tips, and their eyes were brilliant amber, with a nictitating membrane that protected them from dust and glare. The mri were at once humanlike and disturbingly alien. Such also were their minds, that could grasp outsiders’ ways and yet steadfastly refused to compromise with them.

 

In the next room, similarly treated, lay Melein, called she’pan, leader of the mri: a young woman and while Niun was angular and gaunt, a warrior of his kind, Melein was delicate and fine. On their faces both mri were scarred, three fine lines of blue stain slanting across each cheek, from the inner corner of the eye to the outer edge of the cheekbone, marks of meaning no human knew. On Melein’s sleeping face, the fine blue lines lent exotic beauty to her bronze-lashed eyes; she seemed too fragile to partake of mri ferocity, or to bear the weight of mri crimes. Those that handled the mri treated her gently, even hushed their voices when they were in the room with her, touched her as little as possible, and that carefully. She seemed less a captive enemy than a lovely, sad child.

 

It was Niun they chose for their investigations Niun, unquestionably the enemy, who had exacted a heavy price for his taking. He had been stronger from the beginning, his wounds more easily treated; and for all that, it was not officially expected that Niun survive. They called their examinations medical treatments, and entered them so in the records, but in the name of those treatments, Niun had been holographed, scanned inside and out, had yielded tissue samples and sera whatever the investigators desired and more than once Duncan had seen him handled with unfeeling roughness, or left on the table too near waking while humans delayed about their business with him.

 

Duncan closed his eyes to it, fearing that any protest he made would see him barred from the mri’s vicinity entirely. The mri had been kept alive, despite their extensive injuries; they survived; they healed; and Duncan found that of the greatest concern. The mri’s personal ethic rejected outsiders, abhorred medicine, refused the pity of their enemy; but in nothing had these two mri been given a choice. They belonged to the scientists that had found the means to prolong their lives. They were not allowed to wake and that too was for the purpose of keeping them alive.

 

“Niun,” Duncan said softly, for the guard outside was momentarily staring elsewhere. He touched the back of Niun’s long-fingered hand, below the webbing of the restraint; they kept the mri carefully restrained at all times, for Niun would tear at the wound if he once found the chance: so it was feared. Other captive mri had done so, killing themselves. None had ever been kept alive.

 

“Niun,” he said again, persistent in what had become a twice-daily ritual to let the mri know, if nothing more, that someone remained who could speak his name; to make the mri think, in whatever far place his consciousness wandered; to make some contact with the mri’s numbed mind.

 

Niun’s eyes briefly seemed to track and gave it up again, hazing as the membrane went over them.

 

“It’s Duncan,” he persisted, and closed his hand forcefully on the mri’s. “Niun, it’s Duncan.”

 

The membrane retreated; the eyes cleared; the slim fingers jerked, almost closed. Niun stared at him, and Duncan’s heart leaped in hope, for it was the first indication the mri had made that he was aware, proof that the mind, the man he knew, was undamaged. Duncan saw the mri’s eyes wander through the room, linger at the door, where the guard was visible.

 

“You are still on Kesrith,” Duncan said softly, lest the guard hear and notice them. “You’re aboard probe ship Flower, just outside the city. Pay no attention to the man. That is nothing, Niun. It’s all right.”

 

Possibly Niun understood; but the amber eyes hazed and closed, and he slipped back into the grip of the drugs, free of pain, free of understanding, free of remembering.

 

They were the last of their kind, Niun and Melein the last mri, not alone on Kesrith, but anywhere. It was the reason that the scientists would not let them go: it was a chance at the mri enigma that might never, after them, be repeated. The mri had died here on Kesrith, in one night of fire and treachery all, all save these two, who survived as a sad curiosity in the hands of then enemies.

 

And they had been put there by Duncan, whom they had trusted.

 

Duncan pressed Niun’s unfeeling shoulder and turned away, paused to look through the dark glass partition into the room where Melein lay sleeping. He no longer visited her, not since she had grown stronger. Among mri she would have been holy, untouchable: an outsider did not speak to her directly, but through others. Whatever she endured of loneliness and terror among her enemies was not worse than humiliation. Her enemies she might hate and ignore, slipping into unconsciousness and forgetting; but before him, whose name she knew, who had known her when she was free, she might feel deep shame.

 

She rested peacefully. Duncan watched the gentle rise and fall of her breathing for a moment, assuring himself that she was well and comfortable, then turned away and opened the door, murmured absent-minded thanks to the guard, who let him out of the restricted section and into the outer corridor.

 

Duncan ascended to the main level of the crowded probe ship, dodging white-uniformed science techs and blue-uniformed staff, a man out of place in Flower. His own khaki brown was the uniform of the SurTac, Surface Tactical Force. Like the scientific personnel of Flower, he was an expert; his skills, however, were no longer needed on Kesrith or elsewhere. The war was over.

 

He had become like the mri, obsolete.

 

He checked out of Flower, a clerical formality. Security knew him well enough, as all humans on Kesrith knew him the human who had lived among mri. He walked out onto the ramp and down, onto the mesh causeway humans flung across the powdery earth of Kesrith.

 

Nothing grew on the white plain outside, as far as the eye could see. Life was everywhere scant on Kesrith, with its alkali flats, its dead ranges, its few and shallow seas. The world was lit by a red sun named Arain, and by two moons. It was one of six planets in the system, the only one even marginally habitable. The air was thin, cold in shadow and burning hot in the direct rays of Arain; and rains that passed through it left the skin burning and dry. Powdery, caustic dust crept into everything, even the tightest seals, making men miserable and eventually destroying machinery. In most places Kesrith was uninhabitable by humans, save here in the lowland basin about Kesrith’s sole city, on the shore of a poisonous sea: one small area where moisture was plentiful, amid geysers and steaming pools, and crusted earth that would not bear a man’s weight.

 

No men were indigenous to Kesrith. The world had first belonged to the dusei, great brown quadrupeds, vaguely ursine in appearance, velvet-skinned and slow-moving, massively clawed. Then had come the mri, whose towers had once stood over toward the high hills, where now only a heap of stone remained, a tomb for those that had died within.

 

And then had come the regul, hungry for minerals and wealth and territory, who had hired the mri to fight against humankind. It was the regul city that humanity had inherited, humans the latest heirs to Kesrith: a squat agglomerate of ugly buildings, the tallest only two stories, and those stories lower than human standard. The city was laid out in a rectangle: the Nom, the sole two-storied building, was outermost, with other buildings arranged in the outline of the square before it. All streets followed that bow about the Nom square narrow streets that were designed for regul transport, not human vehicles, streets crossed by the fingers of white sand that intruded everywhere on Kesrith, constantly seeking entry. At the left of the city was the Alkaline Sea, that received the runoff of Kesrith’s mineral flats. Volcanic fires smouldered and bubbled under the surface of that sea as they did below that of the whole valley, that had once been a delicate land of thin crusts and mineral spires a land pitted and ruined now by scars of combat.

 

There was a water-recovery plant, its towers extending out into the sea. Repairs were underway there, trying to release the city from its severe rationing. There had been a spaceport too, on the opposite side of the city, but that was now in complete ruin, an area of scorched earth and a remnant of twisted metal that had once been a regul and a mri ship.

 

Of ships onworld now, there was only Flower, an out-worlds probe designed for portless landings, squatting on a knoll of hard rock that rose on the water-plant road. Beside her, an airfield had been improvised by mesh and by fill and hardening of the unstable surface work that would quickly yield to the caustic rains. Nothing was lasting on Kesrith. Endure it might, so long as it received constant attention and repair; but the weather and the dust would take it in the end. The whole surface of Kesrith seemed to melt and flow under the torrential rains, the whole storm pattern of the continent channeled by mountain barriers toward this basin, making it live, but making life within it difficult.

 

It was an environment in which only the dusei and the mri had ever thrived without the protections of artificial environments; and the mri had done so by reliance on the dusei.

 

To such an inheritance had humanity come, intruders lately at war with the mri and now at war with their world, almost scoured off its face by storms, harassed by the wild dusei, befriended only by the regul, who had killed off the mri for them, an act of genocide to please their human conquerors.

 

Duncan traversed the causeway at his own slow pace, savoring the acrid air. His bare face and hands were painfully assaulted by Arain’s fierce radiation even in this comparatively short walk. It was noon. Little stirred in the wild during the hours of Arain’s zenith; but humans, safe within their filtered and air-conditioned environments, ignored the sun. Human authority imposed a human schedule on Kesrith’s day, segmenting it into slightly lengthened seconds, minutes, hours, for the convenience of those who dwelled in the city, where daylight was visible and meaningful, but those were few. Universal Standard was still the yardstick for the scientific community of Flower, and for the warship that orbited overhead.

 

Duncan walked with eyes open to the land, saw the camouflaged body of a leathery jo, one of the flying creatures of Kesrith, poised to last out the heat in the shadow of a large rock saw also the trail of a sandsnake that had lately crossed the ground beside the causeway, seeking the nether side of some rock to protect itself from the sun and from predators. The jo waited, patiently, for its appointed prey. Such things Niun had taught Duncan to see.

 

Across the mineral flats, in the wreckage wrought by the fighting, a geyser plumed, a common sight. The world was repairing its damage, patiently setting about more aeons of building; but hereafter would come humans in greater and greater numbers, to search out a way to undo it and make Kesrith their own.

 

The mesh gave way to concrete at the city’s edge, a border partially overcome by drifting sand. Duncan walked onto solid ground, past the observation deck of the Nom, where a surveillance system had been mounted to watch the causeway, and up to the rear door that had become main entry for human personnel, leading as it did toward Flower and the airfield and shuttle landing.

 

The door hissed open and shut. Nom air came as a shock, scented as it was with its own filtered human-regul taint, humidified and sweeter than the air outside, that sunlight-over-cold heat that burned and chilled at once. Here were gardens, kept marginally watered during rationing, botanical specimens from regul worlds, and therefore important: a liver-spotted white vine that had shed its lavender blooms under stress; a sad-looking tree with sparse silver leaves; a hardy gray-green moss. And the regul-built halls high in the center, at least by regul standards gave a tall human a feeling of confinement. The corridors were rounded and recessed along one side, where gleaming rails afforded regul sleds a faster, hazard-free movement along the side without doors. As Duncan turned for the ramp, one whisked past almost too fast to distinguish, whipped round the corner and was gone. At that pace it would be a supply sled, carrying cargo but no personnel.

 

Regul tended much to automation. They moved slowly, ponderously, their short legs incapable of bearing their own weight for any distance. The regul who did move about afoot were younglings, sexless and still mobile, not yet having acquired their adult bulk. The elders, the muscles of their legs atrophied, hardly stirred at all, save in the prosthetic comfort of their sleds.

 

And, alien in the corridors of the Nom, humans moved, tall, stalking shapes strangely rapid among the squat, slow forms of regul.

 

Duncan’s own quarters were on the second level, a private room. It was luxury in one sense: solitude was a comfort he had not had in a very long time, for he had come to Kesrith as attendant to the governor; but he was keenly aware what the small, single room represented, a fall from intimacy with the important powers of Kesrith, specifically with Stavros, the Honorable George Stavros, governor of the new territories of human conquest. Duncan had found himself quietly preempted from his post by a military medical aide, one Evans, E.; he had come back from Kesrith’s backlands and from sickbay to find that state of affairs, and although he had hoped, he had received no invitation to move back into his old quarters in the anteroom of Stavros’ apartments that post of regul protocol which, among their conquered hosts, humans yet observed meticulously in public. An elder of Stavros’ high rank must have at least one youngling to attend his needs and fend off unwelcome visitors; and that duty now belonged to Evans. Duncan was kept at a distance; his contact with Stavros, once close, was suddenly formal: an occasional greeting as they passed in the hall, that was the limit of it. Even the debriefing after his mission had been handled by others and passed second-hand to Stavros, through the scientists, the medics and the military.

 

Duncan understood his disfavor now as permanent. It was Stavros’ concession to the regul, who hated him and feared his influence. And what his position on Kesrith would be hereafter, he did not know.

 

It was, for his personal hopes, the end. He might have promoted himself to a colonial staff position by cultivating Stavros’ favor. He was still due considerable pay for his five year enlistment in the hazardous stage of the Kesrithi mission pay and transport to the world of his choice, or settlement on Kesrith itself, subject to the approval of the governor. He had been lured by such hopes once and briefly, half-believing them. He had taken the post because it was an offer, in an area and at a time when offers were scarce; and because he was nearing his statistical limit of survival on missions of greater hazard. It had seemed then a way to survive, marginally at least, as he had always survived.

 

He had survived again, had come back from Stavros’ service scarred and sunburned and mentally shaken after a trek through the Kesrithi backlands which the lately arrived regulars would never have survived. He had learned Kesrith as no human would after him; and he had been among mri, and had come back alive, which no human had done before him.

 

And in his distress he had told Stavros the truth of what he had learned, directly and trustingly.

 

That had been his great mistake.

 

He passed the door that belonged to Stavros and Evans, and opened his own apartment, Spartan in its appointments and lacking the small anteroom that was essential to status in the Nom, among regul. He touched the switch to close the door, and at the same panel opened the storm shields. The windows afforded a view of the way that he had come, of Flower on her knoll, a squat half-ovoid on stilts; of a sky that, at least today, was cloudless, a rusty pink. There had not been a storm in days. Nature, like the various inhabitants of Kesrith, seemed to have spent its violence: there was an exhausted hush over the world.

 

Duncan stripped and sponged off with chemical conditioner, a practice that the caustic dust of Kesrith made advisable, that his physician still insisted upon, and changed into his lighter uniform. He was bound for the library, that building across the square from the Nom, accessible by a basement hallway: it was part of the regul university complex, which humans now held.

 

He spent his afternoons and evenings there; and anyone who had known Sten Duncan back in humanity’s home territory would have found that incredible. He was not a scholar. He had been well-trained in his profession: he knew the mechanics of ships and of weapons, knew a bit of geology and ecology, and the working of computers all in areas necessary for efficiency in combat, in which he had been trained from a war-time youth, parentless, single-minded in the direction of his life. All his knowledge was practical, gathered at need, rammed into his head by instructors solely interested in his survival to kill the enemy.

 

That was before he had seen his war ended before he had seen his enemy murdered by regul; or shared a camp with the survivors; or seen the proud mri on human charity.

 

Two thousand years of records and charts and tapes lay in the regul library, truths concealed in regul language and regul obscurities. Duncan studied. He searched out what the mri had been on Kesrith, what they had been elsewhere, with an interest infinitely more personal than that of Flower’s scientists.

 

Stavros disapproved. It flaunted attitudes and interests that regul feared and distrusted; and offending the regul ran counter to humanity’s new policies. It embarrassed Stavros; it angered him, who had vast authority on Kesrith and in its new territories.

 

But the library still remained Duncan’s choice on his hours of liberty, which were extensive in his useless existence. He had begun by making himself a nuisance among Flower’s personnel, who themselves were mining the library for what could be gained, duplicating tapes and records wholesale for later study back in the labs of Elag/Haven and Zoroaster. Duncan searched out those particular records that had to do with mri, and made himself helpful to certain of the Flower personnel who could be persuaded to share his interest. With his own stumbling command of the regul tongue, he could do little himself toward solving the tapes or interpreting the charts; but he talked with the scientists who could. He reasoned with them; he tried to make them understand, with all his insistence, that which he did not understand himself.

 

To learn what it was he had spent his life destroying, what he had seen utterly obliterated.

 

He gathered up his notes and his handmade dictionary and prepared to leave the room. The light on the panel flashed.

 

“Kose Sten Duncan,” a regul voice said, still giving him his old title as Stavros’ assistant, which surprised him. “Kose Sten Duncan.”

 

He pressed the button for reply, vaguely uneasy that anyone in the Nom chose to intervene with him, disturbing his obscurity. His earnest ambition now was simple: to be let alone, to take those assignments that might be given him through lower channels, and to be forgotten by the higher ones.

 

“I am here,” he told the regul.

 

“The reverence bai Stavros sends you his order that you join him in his offices immediately.”

 

Duncan hesitated, heart clenched at the foreknowledge that his period of grace was over. Somewhere in the labyrinth of Flower papers must have been signed, declaring him fit for service; somewhere hi the Nom papers were being prepared that would similarly mark him down in someone’s employ. Nothing on colonial Kesrith could remain without some designated use.

 

‘Tell the reverence,” he said, “that I am coming now.”

 

The regul returned some curt syllable, ending the communication; it lacked respect. Duncan flung his notes onto the table, opened the door and strode out into the corridor.

 

It was no accident that Stavros had summoned him at this hour. Duncan had become precise in his habits: from his treatment before noon, to his apartment at noon, and from his apartment to the library by a quarter til.

 

And concerning the library, he had received his warning.

 

He began, feverish in his anxiety, to anticipate the worst things that might await him: a reprimand, a direct order to abandon his visits to the library or barring him from Flower, and from the mri. He had already defied Stavros’ hinted displeasure; and did he receive and refuse a direct order he would find himself transferred permanently station-ward, to Saber, Kesrith’s military guard.

 

Where you belong, he could imagine Stavros saying. Leave the mri to the scientists.

 

He stalked through the corridor that wound down the ramp, shouldering aside a slow-moving regul youngling at the turn and not apologizing. Nor would the regul apologize to him, a human it needed not fear. A hiss of anger followed him, and other younglings paused to glare at him.

 

Stavros’ offices, again a matter of status within a regul community, were on the ground floor of the stairless Nom, beyond broad doors that afforded easy access to the regul sleds.

 

The office doors were open. The secretary at Stavros’ reception office was human, another of Saber’s personnel, a ComTech whose specialized linguistic skills were wasted at this post; but at least Stavros considered security, and did not install a regul youngling at this most sensitive post, where too much might be overheard and, by a regul, memorized verbatim at the hearing. The tech stirred from his boredom, recognized Duncan with an expression of sudden reserve. A SurTac, Duncan was outside the regular military, but he was due a ComTech’s respect.

 

“The governor says go on in,” the tech said; and with a flicker of a glance to the closed inner door and back again: “The bai is in there, sir.”

 

Hulagh.

 

Elder of the regul on Kesrith,

“Thank you,” Duncan said, jaw set.

 

“Sir,” the ComTech said. “With apologies: the governor advises you to walk in softly. His words, sir.”

 

“Yes,” Duncan said, and restrained his temper with a visible effort for the ComTech’s benefit. He knew how he was reputed at Kesrith base for rashness marked with official disfavor. He also knew his way among the diplomats better than any deskbound tech.

 

It was not the moment for temper. His transfer to Saber would be complete victory for the regul bai. He could throw away every remaining influence he had on the behalf of the mri, with a few ill-chosen words between himself and Stavros or between himself and the bai, and he was resolved to keep them unspoken. The regul would not understand any difference of opinion between elder and youngling; any intimation of dissent would reflect on Stavros, and Stavros would not ignore that, not on a personal basis, not on an official one.

 

The secretary opened the door by remote and Duncan entered with a meek and quiet step, with a bow and a proper deference to the two rulers of Kesrith.

 

“Duncan,” said Stavros aloud, and not unkindly. Both human and regul bai were encased in shining metal, alike until the eye rested on the flesh contained in the center of the sled-assembly. Stavros was exceedingly advanced in years, partially paralyzed, his affliction which he had suffered on Kesrith still hindering his speech to such an extent that he used the sled’s communication screen to converse with regul, in their difficult language; but to humans he had begun to use speech again. The stricken limbs had regained some strength, but, Stavros still kept to the sled, regul-made, the prestige of a regul elder. Speed, power, instant access to any circuitry in the Nom: Duncan understood the practical considerations in which Stavros refused to give up the machine, but he hated the policy which it represented human accommodation with the regul, human imitation of regul ways.

 

“Sir,” Duncan said quietly, acknowledging the greeting; and he faced bai Hulagh in the next breath, serenely courteous and trembling inside with anger, smiling as he met the small dark eyes of the regul elder. Great hulking monster in silver-edged gossamer, his flesh fold over fold of fat in which muscle had almost completely atrophied, particularly in the lower limbs: Duncan loathed the sight of him. The regul’s face was bony plate, dark as the rest of his hide, and smooth, unlike the rest of his hide. The composite of facial features, their symmetry, gave an illusion of humanity; but taken individually, no feature was human. The eyes were brown and round, sunk in pits of wrinkled skin. The nose was reduced to slits that could flare or close completely. The lips were inverted, a mere tight-pressed slash at the moment, edged in bony plate. Hulagh’s nostrils were tightly compressed now, save for quick puffs of expelled air, a signal of displeasure in the meeting as ominous as a human scowl.

 

Hulagh turned his sled abruptly aside, a pointed rebuff to a presumptuous youngling, and smiled at Stavros, a relaxing of the eyes and nostrils, a slight opening of the mouth. It was uncertain whether such a gesture was native to the regul or an attempt at a human one.

 

“It is good,” said Hulagh in his rumbling Basic, “that the youngling Duncan has recovered.”

 

“Yes,” said Stavros aloud, in the regul tongue. The com screen on the sled angled toward Duncan and flashed to Basic mode, human symbols and alphabet. Be seated. Wait.

 

Duncan found a chair against the wall and sat down and listened, wondering why he had been called to this conference, why Stavros had chosen to put him on what surely was display for Hulagh’s benefit. Duncan’s inferior command of the regul language made it impossible for him to pick up much of what the regul bai said, and he could gather nothing at all of what Stavros answered, for though he could see the com screen at this angle, he could read but few words of the intricate written language, which the eidetic regul almost never used themselves.

 

One hearing of anything, however complex, and the regul never forgot. They needed no notes. Their records were oral, taped, reduced to writing only when deemed of some lasting importance.

 

Duncan’s ears pricked when he heard his own name and the phrase released from duty. He sat still, hands tightening on the edge of the thick regul chair while the two diplomats traded endless pleasantries, until at last Hulagh prepared to take his leave.

 

The bai’s sled faced about. This time Hulagh turned that false smile on him. “Good day, youngling Duncan,” he said.

 

Duncan had the presence of mind to rise and bow, which was the courteous and proper response for a youngling to an elder; and the sled whisked out the opened door as he stood, fists clenched, and looked down at Stavros.

 

“Sit down,” Stavros said.

 

The door closed. Duncan came and took the chair nearest Stavros’ sled. The windows blackened, shutting out the outside world. They were entirely on room lights.

 

“My congratulations,” Stavros said. “Well played, if obviously insincere.”

 

“Am I being transferred?” Duncan asked directly, an abruptness that brought a flicker of displeasure to Stavros’ eyes. Duncan regretted it at once further proof, Stavros might read it, that he was unstable. Above all else, he had wished to avoid that impression.

 

“Patience,” Stavros counseled him. Then he spoke to the ComTech outside, gave an order for incoming calls to be further delayed, and relaxed with a sigh, still watching Duncan intently. “Hulagh,” said Stavros, “has been persuaded not to have your head. I told him that your hardship in the desert had unhinged your mind. Hulagh seems to accept that possibility as an excuse that will save his pride. He has decided to accept your presence in his sight again; but he doesn’t like it.”

 

“That regul,” Duncan said, doggedly reiterating the statement that had ruined him, “committed genocide. If he didn’t push the button himself, he ordered the one that did. I gave you my statement on what happened out there that night. You know that I’m telling the truth. You know it.”

 

“Officially,” said Stavros, “I don’t. Duncan, I will try to reason with you. Matters are not as simple as you would wish. Hulagh himself suffered in that action: he lost his ship, his younglings, his total wealth and his prestige and the prestige of his doch. A regul doch may fall, one important to mankind. Do you comprehend what I’m telling you? Hulagh’s doch is the peace party. If it falls, it will be dangerous for all of us, and not only for those of us on Kesrith. We’re talking about the peace, do you understand that?”

 

They were back on old ground. Arguments began from here, leading to known positions. Duncan opened his mouth to speak, persistently to restate what Stavros knew, what he had told his interrogators times beyond counting. Stavros cut him off with an impatient gesture, saving him the effort that he knew already was futile. Duncan found himself tired, exhausted of hope and belief in the powers that ruled Kesrith, most of all in this man that he had once served.

 

“Listen,” said Stavros sharply. “Human men died, too at Haven.”

 

“I was there,” Duncan returned, bitter in the memory. He did not add what was also true, that Stavros had not been. Many a SurTac had left his unburied corpse on Elag/Haven, and ten other worlds of that zone, while the diplomats were safe behind the lines.

 

“Human men died,” Stavros continued, intent on making his point, “there and here, at the hands of mri. Humans would have died in-the future will die, if the peace should collapse, if somewhere the regul that want war find political power and more such mercenaries as the mri. Or does that fail to matter in your reckoning?”

 

“It matters.”

 

Stavros was silent a time. He moved his sled to reach for a cup of soi abandoned on the edge of a table. He drank, and stared at Duncan over the rim of the cup, set it down again. “I know it matters,” he said at last. “Duncan, I regretted having to replace you.”

 

It was the first time Stavros had said so. “Yes, sir,” Duncan said. “I know it was necessary.”

 

“There were several reasons,” Stavros said. “First, because you offended bai Hulagh to his face, and you know you’re lucky to have come off alive from that. Second, you were put into sickbay with an indefinite prognosis, and I need help ” He gestured at his own body, encased in metal. “You’re no medic. You didn’t sign on for this. Evans is useful in that regard. Your skills are valuable elsewhere.”

 

Duncan listened, painfully aware that he was being played, prepared for something. One did not maneuver George Stavros; Stavros maneuvered others. Stavros was a professional at it; and the mind in that fettered shell had very few human dependencies, an aged man who had dealt with crises involving worlds for more years than SurTacs tended to live, who had thrown aside family and a comfortable retirement to seize a governorship on a frontier like Kesrith. For a brief time Duncan had felt there had been some attachment between himself and Stavros; he had given Stavros unstintingly of effort and loyalty had even believed in him enough to offer him truth. But to manage others with subtlety, even with ruthlessness, that was the skill for which Stavros had won his appointment; Duncan determined neither to believe him nor to be angry that he had been used and he knew that even so, Stavros had the skill to lie to him again.

 

“I have excused your actions,” Stavros said, “and covered them as far as I can; but you have lost your usefulness to me hi the capacity in which you signed on. Hulagh can be persuaded to tolerate your presence; but the suspicion that you have moved back into some position of direct influence would be more than he could bear, and it might endanger your life. I don’t want that kind of trouble, Duncan, or the complications your murder might create. Regul are simply not prepared to believe the killing of a youngling is of equal seriousness with the killing of an elder.”

 

“I don’t want to be sent offworld.”

 

“You don’t.”

 

“No, sir. I don’t.”

 

Stavros stared at him. “You have this personal attachment to those two mri. Attachment obsession. You’re no longer a rational man on the subject, Duncan. Think. Explain to me. What do you hope to do or to find? What’s the point of this sudden scholarship of yours, these hours in the library, in full view of the regul? What are you looking for?”

 

“I don’t know, sir.”

 

“You don’t know. But’ it involves every mri record you can find.”

 

Duncan clenched his jaw, leaned back and made himself draw an even breath. Stavros left the silence, waiting for him. “I want to know,” Duncan said finally, “what they were. I saw them die. I saw a whole species die out there. I want to know what it was I saw destroyed.”

 

“That doesn’t make sense.”

 

“I was there. You weren’t.” Duncan’s mind filled again with the night, the dark, the blinding light of the destruction. A mri body pressed against him, two men equally trembling in the forces that had destroyed a species.

 

Stavros gazed at him a long time. His face grew sober, even pitying, and this was unaccustomed for Stavros. “What do you think? That it might have been you that drew the attack to them? Is that what’s eating at you that you might be responsible, as much as Hulagh?”

 

It hit near enough the mark. Duncan sat still, knowing that he was not going to be able to talk rationally about it Stavros let the silence hang there a moment.

 

“Perhaps,” said Stavros finally, “it would be better if you would go up to Saber for a time, into an environment more familiar to you, where you can sort out your thinking.”

 

“No, sir. It would not be better. You took me off assignment with you. I accept that. But give me something else: I waive my transfer home, and my discharge. Give me another assignment, here on Kesrith.”

 

“That is a request, I take it.”

 

“Yes, sir. That is a request.”

 

“Everything you do, since you were attached to me, is observed and taken for omen by the regul. You’ve persisted in aggravating the situation. You came here to assist, SurTac Duncan, not to formulate policy.”

 

Duncan did not answer. It was not expected. Stavros’ mouth worked in the effort prolonged speech cost him; he drew a difficult breath, and Duncan grew concerned, remembering that Stavros was a sick man, that he was trying, amid all other pressures, to remember something of personal debts. He put a curb on his temper.

 

“You took it on yourself,” Stavros said at last, “to accuse bai Hulagh of murder. You created an incident that nearly shipwrecked the whole Kesrithi diplomatic effort. Maybe you think you were justified. Let us suppose ” Stavros’ harsh, strained voice acquired a marginally gentler tone. “Let us suppose for the sake of argument that you were absolutely justified. But you do not make decisions like that, SurTac Duncan, and you must know that, somewhere at the bottom of your righteousness.”

 

“Yes, sir,” he said very quietly.

 

“As it happens,” said Stavros, “I don’t doubt you. And I’m positive the bai tried to kill you in spite of all my efforts to reassure him. When he found you among mri, that was too much for him. I think you know that. I think you’re bothered , by that possibility, and I wish that I could set your mind at ease and say that it wasn’t so. I can’t. Hulagh probably did exactly what you charge he did. But charges like that aren’t profitable for me to pursue right now. I recovered you alive. That was the best that I could do, with all else that was going on. I recovered your mri too, quite incidentally.”

 

“What remains of them. The medics “

 

“Yes. What remains of them. But you can’t undo that. You can’t do a thing about it.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“The medics tell me you’ve healed.”

 

“Yes, sir.” Duncan drew a deep breath and decided finally that Stavros was trying to put him at ease. He watched as the governor tried awkwardly to manipulate a clean cup into the dispenser rose and took over that task, filling the cup the governor was going to offer him. Stavros favored him with a one-sided smile.

 

“Still not what I was,” Stavros said ruefully. “The medics don’t make extravagant promises, but the exercises are helping. Makes the metal beast easier to manage, at least. Here, give my cup a warm-up, will you?”

 

Duncan did as requested, put it in Stavros’ hand, settled again with his own cup cradled in his palms. After a moment he took his first sip, savoring the pleasant warmth. Soi was a mild stimulant. He found himself drinking more of it than was likely good for him these last few days, but his taste for food had been off since his sojourn in the desert. He sipped at the hot liquid and relaxed, knew that he was being swept into Stavros’ talented manipulations, set at ease, moved, directed; but he was also being heard, for what it was worth. He believed, if nothing else, that Stavros began to listen and cultivated the regul for reasons that did not involve naivete.

 

“It was a mistake, my speaking out,” Duncan admitted, which he had never admitted, not to his several interrogators or in any of the written reports he had filed. “It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was saying; I did. But I shouldn’t have said it in front of the regul.”

 

“You were in a state of collapse. I understood that.”

 

Duncan’s mouth twisted. He set the cup aside. “Security got a sedative into me to shut me up and you know it. I did not collapse.”

 

“You talked about a holy place,” Stavros said. “But you never would talk about it in debriefing, not even to direct questions. Was that where you found the artifact you brought back?”

 

Duncan’s eyes went unfocused, his heart speeding. His hands shook. He attempted to disguise the fact by reaching for the plastic cup and clenching it tightly in both hands.

 

“Duncan?”

 

Dark and fire, a gleaming metal ovoid cradled in Niun’s arms, precious to the mri, more than their lives, who were the last of their kind. Do nothing, Melein had bidden him while he stood in that place holy to the mri, touch nothing, see nothing. He had violated that trust, delivering the wounded mri into human care, to save their lives, by putting that metal ovoid into human hands, itself to be probed by human science. He had spoken in delirium. He looked at Stavros, helpless to shrug it off; he did not know how much he had said, or with what detail. There was the artifact itself, in Flower’s labs, to make lies of any denial.

 

“I had better write the reports over,” Duncan said. He did not know what else to say. A colonial governor had dictatorial powers in that stage before there were parliaments and laws. He himself was not a civ, and unprotected in any instance. There was very little that Stavros could not do even including execution, certainly including shipping him to some station elsewhere, away from the mri, away from all hope of access to them and to Kesrith, forever.

 

“Your account was not accurate, then.”

 

Duncan cast everything into the balance. “I was shaken. I wasn’t sure, after I was silenced the first time, how much was really wanted on record.”

 

“Don’t give me that nonsense.”

 

“I was not rational at the time. To be honest to be honest, sir, I had the feeling that you wanted to bury everything about the mri, everything that happened. I wasn’t sure I might not be put off Kesrith because I knew too much. I’m still not sure that it won’t happen.”

 

“You know the seriousness of what you’re charging?”

 

“This is a frontier,” Duncan said. “I know that you can do what you want to do. Even to having me shot. I don’t know the limit of what I know or how important it is. If an entire species can be wiped off the board and forgotten what am I?”

 

Stavros frowned, sipped at his drink, made a face and set it aside again. “Duncan, the regul are living; their victims aren’t. So we deal with the regul, who are a force still dangerous and the mri ” He moved the sled, turned it, looked at him at closer range. “You have your opinions on the mri, very obviously. What would you do with them?”

 

“Turn them loose. They won’t live in captivity.”

 

“That simple? But it’s not quite that simple afterwards. What of the regul?”

 

“The mri won’t fight for the regul any longer and there are only two of them. Only two “

 

“Caring nothing for their lives, even two mri are considerable; and they have a considerable grudge against bai Hulagh who heads the regul peace party, SurTac Duncan.”

 

“I know these two mri,” Duncan said. “They did nothing to anyone on this world except to defend themselves. They only tried to get to safety, and we wouldn’t let them. Let them go now, and they’d leave. That’s all they want.”

 

“For now.”

 

“There is no tomorrow for them,” Duncan said, and then Stavros looked at him quizzically. “There will be no more generations. There’s a taboo between those two. Besides, even if there weren’t ten, even twenty generations wouldn’t make a vast threat out of them.”

 

Stavros frowned, backed the sled, opened the door. “Walk with me,” he said, “upstairs. You’re going nowhere else, I trust.”

 

“Yes, sir,” Duncan agreed. Stavros undoubtedly meant to put him off his balance, and he had done so. He was asked to accompany Stavros in public, before regul. It was a demonstration of something, a restoration of confidence: he was not sure what. Perhaps he was being bribed, in subtle fashion, offered status and the alternative was transfer to Saber. Stavros made it very difficult to continue the debate.

 

The sled eased its way through the office door, past the ComTech; it passed the outer doors, into the corridor. Duncan overtook it as Stavros waited for him. Stavros did not lock into the tracks that could have shot him along at a rate no man afoot could match, but trundled along beside him at a very leisurely pace.

 

“First thing,” said Stavros, :”no more library.” And when Duncan opened his mouth at once to protest: “You have to walk among regul over there, and I’d rather not have that. Flower staff can find what you need, if you describe it. Do you understand me?”

 

“No, sir.”

 

They walked some distance in silence, until a knot of regul had passed them, and they turned the corner into the upward corridor. “I want you,” said Stavros, “to spend your time on Flower as much as possible. Stay clear of the regul entirely. Work at your private obsession through channels, and write me a decent report a full one, this time.”

 

Duncan stopped on the ramp. “I still don’t understand you.”

 

Stavros angled his sled to look up at him, a sidewise motion of the eyes. “Yes, you do. I want you to apply your talents and prepare me a full report on the mri. Use any authority you want that doesn’t involve actually touching the mri themselves.”

 

“What value is that?” Duncan asked. “I’m no scientist.”

 

“Your practical experience,” Stavros said, “makes such a report valuable: not for the researchers, but for me.”

 

“I’ll need clearance over there.”

 

Stavros scowled. “I’ll tell you something, Duncan, and you listen to me. I don’t share your enthusiasm for preserving the mri. They were a plague in the universe, a blight, at best an anachronism among species that have learned their lessons of civilization to better advantage. They are probably the most efficient killers in all creation; but we didn’t bring them to extinction, nor did the regul nor did you. They are dying because they have no interest in comprehending any other way of life. No quarter, no prisoners, no negotiation or compromise: everything is black and white in their eyes, nothing gray. I don’t blame them for it; but their way of life was destruction, and they’re dying now by the same standard they applied to others: nature’s bias, if you like, not mine. Convince me otherwise if you can. And be careful with them. If you don’t respect them for what they are, instead of what your delirium remembers, then those two mri will end up killing someone: themselves certainly; you, likely; others, very possibly.”

 

“Then I will be allowed access to them.”

 

“Maybe.”

 

“Give me that now, and I can talk with them as the staff can’t. Keep the medics and their drugs away from them while they have minds left.”

 

“Duncan ” Stavros started moving again, slowly, turning the corner at the top of the ramp. “You were the one exception to their no-prisoner rule, the one exception in forty years. You are aware, of course, that there may have been a certain irrational sense of dependency generated there, in the desert, in their environment, in your unexpected survival. They gave you food and water, kept you alive, contrary to your own natural expectations; you received every necessity of life from their hands. When you expect ill and receive good instead, it has certain emotional effects, even when you really know nothing about the motives of the people involved. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

 

“Yes, sir. I’m aware of that possibility. It may be valid.”

 

“And that’s what you want to find out, is it?”

 

“That, among other things.”

 

They reached the door of Stavros’ apartments. Stavros opened it by remote, slipped in and whipped the sled about, facing him in the doorway. Evans stood across the room, seeming surprised at them: a young man, Evans Duncan looked at him, who had been the focus of his bitter jealousy, and found a quiet, not particularly personable youth.

 

“Take the afternoon off,” Stavros said to Duncan. “Stay in the Nom. I’ll prepare an order transferring you to Flower and salving feelings among the civs over there. I’ll send you a copy of it. And I expect you realize I don’t want any feelings ruffled over there among the scientific staff; they don’t like the military much. Use tact. You’ll get more out of them.”

 

“Yes, sir.” Duncan was almost trembling with anxiety, for almost all that he wanted was in his hands, everything. “And access to the mri themselves “

 

“No. Not yet. Not yet. Go on. Give me time.”

 

Duncan tried to make a gesture of some sort, a courtesy; it was never easy at the best of times between himself and Stavros. In the end he murmured something inarticulate and left, awkward in the leaving.

 

“Sir?”

 

Stavros turned the sled about, remembered that he had ordered lunch when he returned. He accepted the offered mug of soup and scowled at Evans” attempt to help him with it, took it into his own hands. Returning function in his afflicted limbs made him arrogant in his regained independence. He analyzed his irritation as impatience with his own unrespon-ding muscles and Evans merely as a convenient focus. He murmured a surly thanks.

 

“Files on the mri,” he ordered Evans. “And on Sten Duncan.”

 

Evans moved to obey. Stavros settled and drank the soup, savoring something prepared entirely by humans, seasoned with human understanding of spices. It was too new a luxury after the long stay in regul care to take entirely for granted; but after a moment the cup rested neglected in his hand.

 

The fact was that he missed Duncan.

 

He missed him sorely, and still reckoned him better spent as he had just disposed of him. The SurTac had entered service with him as a bodyguard disguised as a servant, drawn out of combat at war’s end to dance attendance on a diplomat. Duncan was a young man, if any man who had seen action at Elag/Haven could ever again be called young. He was remarkable in his intelligence, according to records which Duncan had probably never seen another of the young men that the war had snatched up and swallowed whole before they had ever known what they might have been. Duncan had learned to take orders, but SurTac-style: loners, the men of his service, unaccustomed to close direction. They were usually given only an objective, limited in scope, and told to accomplish it: the rest was up to the SurTac, a specialist in alien environment, survival, and warfare behind the enemy’s lines.

 

Stavros himself had sent the SurTac out to learn Kesrith.

 

And Kesrith had nearly killed Duncan. Even the look of him was changed, reshaped by the forge of the Kesrithi desert. Something was gone, that had been there before Duncan had gone out into that wilderness his youth, perhaps; his humanity, possibly. He bore scars of it, face half-tanned from wearing mri veils in the searing sunlight, frown lines burned into the edges of his eyes, making them hard and different. He had come back with lungs racked and his breathing impaired from the thin air and caustic dust, with his body weight down by a considerable measure, and a strange, fragile tread, as if he mistrusted the very flooring. Days in sickbay had taken care of the physical injuries, restored him with all the array of advanced equipment available on the probe ship; but there was damage that would never be reached, that had stamped the look of the fanatic on the young SurTac.

 

The regul bai was correct when he perceived Sten Duncan as an enemy. The regul as a species had no more deadly enemy than this, save the mri themselves. Duncan hated, and Duncan knew the regul better than any human living save Stavros himself, for they two had come alone among regul, the first humans to breach the barriers to contact between regul and humanity, here on Kesrith.

 

And most particularly Duncan hated bai Hulagh Alagn-ni: Hulagh, who had done precisely what Duncan accused him of doing, killing the mri who had served regulkind as mercenaries, obliterating a sapient species. Hulagh had done it for desperate fear, and for greed, which were intertwined. But bai Hulagh was moved now by fear of disgrace among his own kind and by dawning hope of gain from humans; he had become stranded on the world he had hoped to plunder, among humans whom he had hoped to cheat and disgrace. And bai Hulagh thus became vulnerable and valuable.

 

The fact was that one could not, as Duncan tried to do, say regul, and comprehend in that word the reasons and actions of a given member of regulkind. A quasi-nation of merchants and scholars, the regul; but their docha, their associations of birth and trade, were each as independent as separate nations in most dealings. Hulagh was of doch Alagn, and Alagn, a new force in regul politics, had stopped the war. The employers of the mri mercenaries who had wrought such destruction in human space were doch Holn, the great rivals and enemies of Alagn.

 

Doch Holn had ceded Kesrith at war’s end, compelled by the treaty; and in the passing of Kesrith to human control, Holn had fallen to Alagn. But Holn had had its revenge: it had cast Hulagh Alagn-ni into command of Kesrith ignorant of mri and of the nature of Kesrith. The weather had turned: Alagn had been faced with the collapse of their effort of evacuation and plunder of Kesrith; and confronted with incoming humans, Hulagh had panicked. In that panic, seeking to avert human wrath, Hulagh had done murder.

 

It was possible that by that act of murder, that annihilation of the mri, bai Hulagh had saved the lives of those incoming humans, all the personnel of Saber and Flower, Fox and Hannibal. It was possible that humanity guiltily owed bai Hulagh a debt of gratitude, for a sweeping action that human policy could never have taken.

 

Duncan, who believed in absolute justice, could not accept such a thought; but the truth was that doch Alagn and its ruler, Hulagh, were in every respect useful to Kesrith, most particularly in their reliance on humans and in their burning hatred for doch Holn, who had maneuvered them into this unhappy circumstance. For Duncan, as for the mri, there was only black and white, right and wrong. It was impossible to explain to Duncan that Alagn must be cultivated, strengthened, and aimed at Holn, a process too long-range and too little honest for the SurTac.

 

The mri, moreover, were Holn-hired and Holn-managed throughout their history and it was above all else necessary that what Hulagh had done on Kesrith be final: that the mri species be in fact obliterated, and that Holn not maintain in some secret place another force of the breed, those most efficient and skilled killers, for whom Duncan found such tender sympathy. The regul without the mri were incapable of war, constitutionally and physically incapable. With the mri, the regul were capable to any extent. If any mri survived, they could bear no love to doch Alagn for what Hulagh had done to their kind; and personal involvement of the mri in a war, for their own motives and not for hire, was a specter that hung over both Alagn and humanity.

 

The soup turned sour in Stavros’ mouth while he contemplated what measures might eventually prove necessary with the remaining two mri: Duncan’s mri. Duncan was a man of single sight and direct action, innocent in his way; and it was something that Stavros had no wish to do to destroy in the SurTac that which had made him at once a valued adviser and a reliable agent.

 

He loved Duncan as a son.

 

For one of his sons, he would have felt less remorse.

 

Chapter Two

 

THE ORDER went out in the evening. Duncan read and re-read the photocopy over a solitary supper in his quarters in the Nom, at a table littered with other notes, his handmade and carefully gathered materials.

 

Special liaison: that was the title that Stavros had chosen to ease his transfer into Flower’s tight community. The order linked him to the governor’s essentially civilian wing, and not to the military presence that orbited in conjunction with the station, and Duncan appreciated that distinction, that would find more grace with Flower’s personnel. He was given certain authorities to investigate, but not to dispose of artifacts or records or persons: he could actually direct what lines investigations of others were to take: fullest cooperation in pursuing his research . . . that portion of the order began. He read that final section again and again, finding no exception in it, and he was amazed that Stavros had said it.

 

He began to wonder why, and found no answer.

 

Within the hour arrived a packet of documents not on film, and therefore not something meant to be fed into the Nom receptors, where regul might have access to it: it came hand-delivered. Duncan signed for it and settled with the several folders in his lap extensive files that seemed to comprise everything known and done in regard to the mri prisoners. Duncan read them, again and again, absorbing everything he could remotely comprehend.

 

Then followed messages, from one and another department within Flower from security, from biology, from Dr. Luiz, the white-haired chief of surgery who had cared for him during his own stay aboard Flower. Luiz message was warm: it was Luiz who had tacitly given him leave to conduct Ms daily visits aboard Flower, when his own treatments could as easily have been given in the Nom, far from the mri. It was Luiz who had kept the treatment of the mri as decent as it was. who had kept them alive when it was reckoned impossible; and this man Duncan trusted. From others there were more formal acknowledgments, coldness couched in courtesies.

 

The governor’s appointee, bringing power to alter things dear to certain hearts: he began to reckon how the scientists saw him, an intruder who knew nothing about the researches and operations for which these civs had come so far to a frontier world. He did not find it surprising that he was resented. He wished that he had been given authority to alter the condition of the mri, and less authority to threaten other projects. The one he earnestly desired; the other he distrusted because it was excessive and unreasonable; and he did not know Stavros for an excessive man, and certainly not as a man who acted without reasons.

 

He was being aimed at someone or something: he began to fear that this was so. He had become convenient again for Stavros, a weapon to be used once more, in a new kind of warfare against some one of Stavros’ enemies be it the regul, be it some contest of authority between civs and the governor’s office, or designs yet more complex, involving all of them.

 

He was out of Stavros’ reach now, and able to think outside that aura of confidentiality that so readily swept a man into Stavros’ hands and still he found himself willing to suspend all his suspicions and take the lure, for it was all that he wanted, all that mattered to him.

 

Obsession, Stavros had called it.

 

He acknowledged that, and went

At Flower’s duty desk in the morning, more messages waited, each from a department head waiting to see him. Duncan began to find himself uneasy. He postponed dealing with them, and descended first to the medical section, intent most of all on the mri, on assuring himself as he did daily, that they were well and as comfortable as possible under the circumstances most of all now, that no over-eager investigator had decided to be beforehand with them, to finish or initiate some research before it could be forbidden.

 

But before he had more than passed the door into that section, Dr. Luiz hailed him; and he found himself diverted from the mri and hastened into an assembling conference of the various departments of Flower.

 

Being involved in the meeting irked him: he hated all such procedures. He was formally introduced to them, who had known him better as a specimen like the mri, himself the object of some of their researches when he had been dragged in off the desert half-alive, from where no human ought to have survived. He forced a smile to his face, and acknowledged the introductions, then leaned back in his chair and prepared himself for the tedium to come, long exchanges of data and quibblings over objectives and items of supply. He thought it deliberate, a petty administrative revenge that he be drawn into such proceedings, in which he had no knowledge and less interest. He sat surreptitiously studying the manners and faces of the other participants, listening to the petty debates and mentally marking down to be remembered the indications of jealousies and friendships that might be useful.

 

But the central matter did suddenly touch his interest: the news from the military wing that there were arrivals at the station. It troubled him, this piece of news, increasingly so as he listened. Probe ship Fox, along with the warship Hannibal and the rider Santiago, had returned from Gurgain, a world of the star Lyltagh, neighboring Arain, a mining colony of airless moons and rich deposits, only scantly developed by regul. New information was coming in, particularly of interest to the geologists: Flower was sending a crew up to Fox. Personnel were being shifted about, reallotted on new priorities; the mri project was losing some key personnel. Duncan, beginning to perceive the reorganization, felt uneasily that his authority might be sufficient to affect the transfers: he thought that he ought to say something, that he might be expected to do something, to be well-informed in questions of staff and policies and Stavros’ wishes. He was not.

 

He sat frowning while matters were arranged to the satisfaction of the existing powers of Flower, realizing miserably that he was inadequate for the position he had been given: that at the least he should have been taking notes for Stavros’ benefit and he had done nothing, not aware until late what had happened, that a major portion of the directorates had dissolved about him, ill-content, it might be, with the governor’s intervention in their researches: forces wishing to assert their independence of Stavros were aiming this at him, while Other departments looked hi vain for his support.

 

Academics and politics: he was not fit for either. He was conscious of the figure he cut among them, khaki amid their blue and white, a rough-handed soldier out of his element, a hated and ridiculous presence. They concluded their business in his angry silence and adjourned. A few lingered for perfunctory courtesies with him; those bound for Fox pointedly ignored such amenities and walked out without acknowledging his presence. He accepted what courtesies he was offered, still not knowing friend from “nemy, bitter in his ignorance. He was pleasant, having learned from Stavros to smile without meaning it.

 

But afterward, as he tried to leave, he found Lulz’ hand on his shoulder, and Dr. Boaz of xenology smiling up at him with more than casual interest, Boaz a portly woman with the accent of Haven in her speech, her head crowned with gray-blonde braids.

 

“Stavros,” said Boaz, “recalled you mentioned a mri shrine.”

 

He looked at them, this pair that already held the mri’s existence in their hands, the medical chief of staff and this smallish plump woman whose department held all the mri’s possessions. Boaz’ interest was naked in her eyes, scholarly lust. Her small department had survived the dissolution virtually intact and capable of function, while Luiz’ bio-medical staff had lost key personnel to the shift, angry medical personnel choosing the more comfortable existence of the station, under the guise of setting up systems for further probe missions.

 

Boaz and Luiz remained with Flower, and had come into positions of seniority in Flower’s depleted staff.

 

And Luiz approved her. Duncan searched the surgeon’s face, looked again at Boaz.

 

“I was at such a place,” he admitted carefully. “I don’t know whether it would be possible to find it again.” “Let’s talk in my office,” said Boaz.

 

“SurTac Duncan,” the page said for the second time. “You are wanted at the lock.” The aircraft was waiting. It could wait. Duncan pressed a com button at a panel and leaned toward it. “Duncan here. Advise them I’m coming in a few minutes.”

 

He walked then, as he had been granted Luiz’ free permission to do, into the guarded section of the infirmary, no longer there by a bending of regulations, but bearing a red badge that passed him to all areas of the ship but those on voice-lock. It was satisfying to see the difference in security’s reaction to him, the quickness with which doors were opened to him.

 

And when he had come into Niun’s room, the guard outside turned his back, a privacy which he had not often enjoyed.

 

He touched the mri, bent and called his name, wishing for the latest time he had had other options. He had obtained a position of some power again; had recovered favor where it mattered; had fought with every deviousness he knew; but when he looked at the mri’s thin, naked face, it felt not at all like triumph.

 

He wished that they would allow Niun covering for his face; the mri lived behind veils, a modest, proud people. After some days with him, Niun had finally felt easy enough in his presence to show him his face, and to speak to him directly, as a man to a man of like calling.

 

There is no other way for us, Niun had told him, refusing offered help, at a time when the mri had had the power to choose for himself. We either survive as we were, or we have failed to survive. We are mri; and that is more than the name of a species, Duncan. It is an old, old way. It is our way. And we will not change.

 

There were fewer and fewer options for them.

 

Only a friend, Duncan thought bitterly, could betray them with such thoroughness. He had determined they would survive: their freedom would cost something else again; and that, too, he prepared to buy, another betrayal . . . things that the mri regarded as holy. In such coin he bought the cooperation of the likes of Boaz and Luiz; and wondered finally for whose sake he acted, whether Niun could even comprehend his reasoning, or whether it was only selfishness that drove him.

 

“Niun,” he urged him, wishing for some touch of recognition, some reassurance for what he was doing. But Niun was far under this noon: there was no reaction to his name or to the touch on his arm.

 

He could not delay longer. He drew back, still hoping. There was nothing.

 

He had not expected a pilot: he had looked to fly himself. But when he climbed aboard he found the controls occupied by a sandy-haired man who bore Saber’s designation of his sleeve. GALEY, the pocket patch said, LT.

 

“Sorry about the delay,” Duncan said, for the air was hot, noon-heated. “Didn’t know I wasn’t solo on this one.”

 

Galey fired up, shrugged as the engines throbbed into life. “No matter. It’s hot here, hot down there at the water plant on repair detail, too. I’d rather the ship, thanks.”

 

Duncan settled into the copilot’s place, adjusted his gear, the equipment that Boaz had provided, into the space between his feet, and fastened the belts. The ship lifted at an angle, swung off into ‘an immediate sharp turn toward the hills. Cold air flooded them now that they were airborne, delicious luxury after the oven-heat of the aircraft on the ground.

 

“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked of Galey.

 

“I know the route. I flew you out of there.”

 

Duncan gave him a second look, trying to remember him, and could not. It had been dark, a time too full of other concerns. He blinked, realizing Galey had said something else to him, that he had been drifting.

 

“Sorry,” he said. “You asked something?”

 

Galey shrugged again. “No matter. No matter. HowM the kel’ein make out? Still alive, I hear.”

 

“Alive, yes.”

 

“This place we’re going have something to do with them?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Dangerous?”

 

“I don’t know,” he said, considering that for the first time. “Maybe.”

 

Galey absorbed that thought in several kilometers of silence, the white desert slipping beneath them, jagged with rocks. Duncan looked out, saw black dots below.

 

“Dusei,” he said. Galey rocked over and looked.

 

“Filthy beasts,” Galey said.

 

Duncan did not answer him or argue. Most of humankind would say the same, would wish the remaining mri dead, with just cause. He watched the desert slip under the airship’s nose, and the land roughen into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world where time moved more slowly, where realities were different and immediate and he had learned for a time to live.

 

They circled out over Sil’athen, the long T-shaped valley remote in the highlands, a slash into the high plateau, much eroded, a canyon full of strange shapes carved by caustic rains and the constant winds that swept its length. There was wreckage there of ships not yet lifted back for salvage, aircraft that Niun had made the price of his taking; and wreckage too of nature, many an aeons-old formation of sandstone blasted into fragments.

 

When they landed at the crossing of the high valley and stepped out into that place, into the full heat of Aram’s red light, the silence came suddenly on them both, a weight that took the breath away. Duncan felt the air at once, a violent change from the pressurized and filtered air in the ship, and began coughing so painfully that he had at once to have recourse to the canteen. Filter masks and tinted goggles were part of the gear; he put his on, and adjusted the hood of his uniform to shield his head from the sun, while Galey did the same. The mask did not overcome the need to cough; he took another small sip of water.

 

“You all right?” Galey’s voice was altered by the mask. Duncan looked into the broad, freckled face and felt better for the company of someone in such silence; but Galey did not belong, he in no wise belonged. Duncan slung his canteen over his shoulder, gathered up the gear, and tried not to listen to the silence.

 

“I’m all right,” Duncan said. “Listen, if s a long ways down the canyon and up into those rocks. You don’t have to come.”

 

“My orders say otherwise.”

 

“Am I not trusted with this?” Duncan at once regretted the outburst, seeing how Galey looked at him, shocked and taken aback. “Come on,” he said then. “Watch your step.”

 

Duncan walked, at the slow pace necessary in the thin air, Galey walking heavy-footed beside him. The mri were right in the dress they adopted: to have any skin exposed in this sun was not wise; but when Galey began to drift toward the inviting shade of the cliffs, Duncan did not, and Galey returned to him.

 

“Don’t walk the shade,” Duncan said. “There are things you can miss there, that may not miss you. It’s dark enough where we’ll have to be walking, without taking unnecessary chances.”

 

Galey looked at him uneasily, but asked no questions. The wind sang strangely through the sandstone spires.

 

It was a place of ghosts: Sil’athen, burial place of the mri. Duncan listened to the wind and looked about him as they walked, at the high cliffs and caves that held their secrets.

 

A dead people, a dead world. Graves of great age surrounded them here, those on the east with weathered pillars to mark them, those on the west with none. There were writings, many already beyond reading, outworn by the sands, and many a pillar overthrown and destroyed in the fighting that had raged up and down Sil’athen.

 

And in the sand they found the picked bones of a great dus.

 

Sadness struck Duncan when he saw that, for the beasts were companions of the mri, and dangerous as they could be, they could also be gentle: sad-faced, slow-moving protectors of their masters.

 

This, too, was added to the destruction of a way of life.

 

Galey kicked at the skull. “Fast-working scavengers,” he said.

 

“Leave it alone,” Duncan said sharply. Galey blinked, straightened, and took a more formal attitude with him.

 

It was a true observation nonetheless, that there were scavengers in great numbers in the seemingly lifeless wastelands: nothing dropped to the sand but that something made use of it; nothing faltered or erred but that some predator was waiting for that error. The mri themselves did not walk the desert at night without the dusei to guide them. Even by day it was necessary to watch where one stepped, and to keep an eye to rocks that mieht hide ambush. Duncan knew the small depression that identified a burrower’s lair, and how to keep the sun between himself and rocks to avoid the poisonous strands of windflowers. He knew too how to find water when he must, or how to conceal himself the latter an easy task in Sil’athen, where the constant winds erased the tracks of any passage, smoothing the tablet of the sands almost as soon as the foot left the ground. Skirling eddies of dust ran like a mist above the ground, occasionally stirring up in great whistling gusts that drove the sand in clouds.

 

Such a trackless, isolated place the mri had chosen . . . such an end Niun had chosen, as if even in passing they wished to obliterate all trace that they had been.

 

They had been here, he had learned in his long studies, his cajoling of translators, for many centuries, serving regul. Here and hereabouts they had fought against each other . . . for regul in the beginning had hired them against the mercenaries of other regul, mercenaries who also chanced to be mri. The conflicts were listed endlessly in regul records, only the names changing: The mri (singular) of dock Holn defeated the mri (dual) of dock Horag; Horag (indecipherable) fled from the territory (indecipherable).

 

So it had begun here until Holn flung the mri not against mri, but against humanity. Solitary, strange fighters: humans had known a single mri to taunt a human outpost, to provoke a reaction that sometimes ended with more casualties in his killing than humans were willing to suffer. Wise commanders, knowing the suicidal fury of these mri berserkers, held their men from answering, no matter how flagrant the provocation, until the mri, in splendid arrogance, had passed back to his own territory.

 

A challenge, perhaps, to a reciprocal act? Niun was capable of such a rash thing. Niun, whose weapons, worn on two belts at chest and hip, ranged from a laser to a thin, curved sword, an anachronism in the war he fought. An old, old way, Niun had called it AH what was left of it was here.

 

The place had a feeling of menace in its deeper shadows, where the sandstone cliffs began to fold them closer, a sense of holinesses and history, of dead that had never known of humankind. And there were deeper places, utterly alien, where mri sentinels had watched and died, faithful to a duty known only to themselves, and where the rocks hid things more threatening than the dead.

 

He had looked on such.

 

It lay there, distant above the cliffs where the canyon ended, where heaps of rock had tumbled in massive ruin.

 

“How far are we going?” Galey asked, with a nervous eye to the cliffs that confronted them. “We going to climb that?”

 

“Yes,” Duncan said.

 

Galey looked at him, fell sflent again, and trod carefully behind him as he began to seek that way he knew, up among the rocks, a dus-trail and little more. It was there, as he remembered, the way up, concealed in dangerous shadow. He marked his way carefully with his eye, and began it, slowly.

 

Often in the climb he found himself obliged to pause, coughing, and to drink a little and wait, for the air was thinner still on the upper levels, and he suffered despite the mask. Galey too began to cough, and drank overmuch of their water. Duncan considered letting Galey, who had not come as he had, from a stay in sick-bay, carry more of the equipment; but Galey, from Saber’s sterile, automated environment, was laboring painfully.

 

They made the crest at last, and came into sunlight, among tall spires of rock, a maze that bore no track, no enduring sign to indicate that mri had walked here: in this place, as in Sil’athen, the wind scoured the sand.

 

Duncan stood, considering the sinking of red Arain beyond the spires, breathed the air cautiously, felt the place with all his senses. He had land-sense, cultivated in a score of trackless environments, and it drew at him, subtle and under the threshold of reason. Galey started to say something; Duncan curtly ordered silence, stood for a time, and listened. The omnipresent wind pulled at them, frolicked, singing among the spires. He turned left.

 

“Follow me,” he said. “Don’t talk to me. I last walked this in the dark, and things look different.”

 

Galey murmured agreement, still breathing hard. He was silent thereafter, and Duncan was able to forget his-presence as they walked. He would gladly have left Galey: he was not used to company on a mission, was not used to schedules or reports or being concerned for a night spent in the open and SurTac that he was, he had little respect for the regulars when they were stripped of their protective ships and their contact with superiors.

 

It occurred to him that Flower staff had no authority to order a regular from Saber to accompany him.

 

Stavros did.

 

Dark overtook them on the plateau, as Duncan had known it would, in a place where the spires were few and a vast stretch of sand lay between them and the farther cliffs.

 

“We might keep going,” Galey volunteered, though his voice seemed strained already.

 

Duncan shook his head, selected a safe spot, and settled to stay until the dawn, wrapped in a thermal sheet and far more comfortable than in his previous night in this place. They removed the masks and ate, though Galey had small appetite; then they replaced them to sleep, turn and turn about.

 

A jo flew, briefly airborne, a shadow against the night sky. Once Duncan woke to Galey’s whispered insistence that he had heard something moving in the rocks. He sat watch then, while Galey slept or pretended to sleep, and far across the sands he saw the dark shadow of a hunting dus that moved into the deeper shadow of the spires and was gone..

 

He listened to the wind, and looked at the stars, and knew his way now beyond doubt.

 

At the first touch of color to the land, they folded up the blankets and set out again, shivering in the early dawn, Galey stiff and limping from his exertion of the day before.

 

The spires closed about them once more, stained by the ruddy sun, and still the sense of familiarity persisted. They were on the right track; there remained no vestige of doubt in Duncan’s mind, but he savored the silence, and did not break it with conversation.

 

And eventually there lay before him that gap in the rocks, inconspicuous, like a dozen others thereabouts, save for the identifying shelf of rock that slanted down at the left, and the depth of the shadow that lay within.

 

Duncan paused; it occurred to him that even yet there was time to repent what he was doing, that he could lead Galey in circles until they ran out of supplies, and convince them all that he could not remember, that the place was lost to him. It would need great and skilled effort by Boaz’ small staff to locate it without him. It might go unlocated for generations of humans on Kesrith.

 

But relics did not serve a dead people. That everything they had been should perish, that an intelligent species should vanish from the universe, leaving nothing there was no tightness in that

“Here,” he said, and led Galey by the way that he well remembered, that he had seen thereafter in his nightmares, that long, close passage between sandstone cliffs that leaned together and shut out the sky. The passage wound, and seemed to spiral, down into dark and cold. Duncan used his penlight, and its tiny beam showed serpentine writings on the walls, turn after turn into the depths.

 

Daylight broke, blinding and blurring as they arrived at the cul-de-sac that ended their descent. They stood in a deep well of living stone, open to the sky. The walls here too were written over with symbols, and blackened with the traces of fire, both the stone and the metal door that stood open at the far side of the pit.

 

Galey swore: the sound of the human irreverence grated On Duncan’s ears, and he looked to his left, where Galey stared. A huddled mass of bones and burned tatters of black cloth rested in a niche within the stone. It was the guardian of the shrine. Niun had paid him respect; Duncan felt moved to do so and did not know how.

 

“Don’t touch anything,” he said, and immediately recalled Melein’s similar words to him, a chilling echo in the deep well.

 

He tried to put his mind to other things knelt on the sand in the sunlight and opened up the gear that he had carried, photographic equipment, and most of all a signal device. He activated it, and knew from that moment that human presence in this place was inevitable. Searching aircraft would eventually find it.

 

Then with the camera he rose and recorded all that was about them, the writings, the guardian, the doorway with its broken seal, the marks of destroying fire.

 

And last of all he ventured into the dark, into the shrine that not even Niun had presumed to enter only Melein, with Niun to guard the door. Galey started to follow him, stepped within.

 

“Stay back,” Duncan ordered; his voice echoed terribly in the metal chamber, and Galey halted, uncertain, in the doorway retreated when Duncan stared at him. Duncan drew a careful breath then and activated the camera and its light, by that surveying the ruin about him.

 

Shrine: it was rather a place of fire-stained steel, ruined panels, banks of lifeless machinery, stark and unlovely. He had known what he would find here, had heard the sound of it, the working of machinery the night the place had died, destroyed by the mri.

 

And yet the mri, who well understood machines, revered it revered the artifact they had borne away from it.

 

Mistrust recurred in him, human mistrust, the remembrance that the mri had never offered assurances to him: they had only held their hand from him.

 

Banks of machinery, no trace of holiness. The thing that Niun had so lovingly carried hence, that now rested in Flower’s belly, suddenly seemed sinister and threatening … a weapon, perhaps, that could be triggered by probing. The mri penchant for taking enemies with them in their self-destruction made it entirely possible, made Niun’s treasuring of it still comprehensible. Yet Boaz and security evidently had some confidence that it was no weapon.

 

It had its origin here here, cradled in that rest, perhaps, that now was stripped and vacant. Duncan lifted the camera, completed his work among the dead, burned banks, explored recesses where the light pierced deep shadows, where yet the wind had not swept away the ash. Boaz’ people would come here next; some of the computer specialists would try the wreckage of the banks, with little hope. Melein had been thorough, protecting this place from humanity, whatever it once might have been.

 

He had all he needed, all he could obtain. He returned to the entry, and delayed yet again, taking in the place with a last glance, as if that could fix it all in his mind and pierce through the heart of what was mri.

 

“Sir?” Galey said from the well.

 

Duncan turned abruptly, joined Galey in the daylight, moved aside the breathing mask that suddenly seemed to restrict his oxygen glad to draw a breath of acrid, daylit air, wind-clean. Galey’s broad, anxious face seemed suddenly of another, a more welcome world.

 

“Let’s go,” he said then to Galey. “Let’s get out of here.”

 

The lower canyon was already deep in shadow when they reached the edee of the plateau, that path among the rocks that led down into Sil’athen. It was late afternoon where they stood, and twilight down in the canyon beneath them.

 

“Dark’s going to be on us again before we reach the ship,” Duncan said.

 

“We going to go all the way anyway?” Galey asked.

 

Duncan shook his head. “No. At dusk we sit down wherever we are.”

 

Galey did not look pleased. Likely whoever had given him his orders had not well prepared him for the possibilities of nights spent in the open. Duncan’s nose had started bleeding again on the return walk, irritated by the thin, dry air; Galey’s cough had worsened, and if they must spend another night in the open, Galey would be suffering the like.

 

The regular attacked the descent first, scattering pebbles, slipping somewhat in his determination to make haste. And suddenly he stopped.

 

Duncan heard the aircraft at the same instant, a distant hum that grew louder, passed overhead and circled off again. He looked at Galey, and Galey likewise looked disturbed.

 

“Maybe it’s weather moving in on us,” Galey said, “or maybe it’s something urgent at the port.”

 

Duncan had the communicator; he fingered it nervously, reckoning that if either had been the case, then there should have been a call from the aircraft. There was silence.

 

“Move,” he said to Galey.

 

There was no sign of the aircraft while they worked their way down the dangerous descent. They rested hardly at all; Duncan found blood choking him, stripped off the mask and wiped his face, smearing a red streak across his hand dizziness blurred the rocks. He felt his way after Galey, stumbled to the valley floor, the soft and difficult sand.

 

“You’re just out of sickbay,” Galey said, offering with a touch on the straps to take the load that he carried. “Trust me with the gear at least. You’ll be done up again.”

 

“No,” he answered, blindly stubborn. He gathered his feet under him and started walking, overwhelmed with anxiety, Galey struggling to stay with him.

 

Another kilometer up the canyon: this much ground Duncan made before he found his limit with the load he carried, coughing painfully; he surrendered the gear to Galey, who labored along with him, himself suffering from the cold air, rawly gasping after each breath. It was a naked, terribly isolate feeling, walking these shadowed depths among the tombs, carrying a record that did not belong to humanity, that others desired.

 

And there came a regul vehicle lumbering down the canyon, slow and ponderous. Galey swore. Duncan simply watched it come.

 

There was nothing to do, nowhere to go, no longer even any place to conceal the equipment. They were far from the rocks, in the center of the sandy expanse and under observation from the regul.

 

The sled rumbled up to them and stopped. The windscreen rolled back. A regul youngling smiled a regul smile at them both, a mere opening of the mouth that showed the ridge of dentition within.

 

“Kose Sten Duncan,” said the regul. “We grew concerned. All right? All right?”

 

“Entirely,” he said. “Go away. We do not need help.” The smile stayed. The round brown eyes flicked over his face, his hand, the equipage they carried. “Thin air. Heavy to carry, perhaps? Sit on the back, favor. I will carry you. Many bad things are here, evening coming. I am koj Suth Horag-gi. Bai Hulagh sent me. The reverence has profound concern would not wish, kose Sten Duncan, accident to a human party here in the desert. We will take you back.”

 

It was a small vehicle, a sled with a flatbed for cargo, where it was possible to sit without being confined: it was not imminently threatening, and it was pointless pride to refuse and keep walking, when the sled could easily match their best pace.

 

But Duncan did not believe the words he had been told mistrusted the regul presence entirely. Galey was not moving without him, stood waiting his cue; and with great misgivings Duncan climbed aboard the flatbed of the little vehicle. He made room for Galey, who joined him, holding the gear carefully on his lap. The vehicle jolted into a slow turn on the sand.

 

“They must have landed down by our ship,” Galey shouted into his ear. Duncan understood his meaning: regul all over their ship, that they had not secured because there was no living enemy against whom they reasonably ought to have secured it. He cursed himself for that overconfidence.

 

They two were armed. The regul were insane if they hoped to outmatch human reflexes in a direct confrontation; but the fact was that regul could expend younglings such as these with little regret.

 

And the reverence bai Hulagh had sent them Hulagh, whose fear of the mri was obsessive and sufficient for murder.

 

Duncan touched Galey’s arm, used the system of handsig-nals used in emergencies in space. Careful. Hostiles.

 

Friendlies, Galey signed back, hopeful contradiction. There was, to be sure, a treaty in effect, the utmost in courteous cooperation all over Kesrith base. Galey was confpsed. Humans did not like the regul, but hostiles was not a term used any longer.

 

Trouble, Duncan answered. Possible. Watch.

 

Shoot? Galey queried.

 

Possible, he replied.

 

The landsled lumbered on at a fair clip, enough that keeping their place on the flatbed was not an easy matter. But what would have been a long and man-killing walk in Kesrith’s atmosphere and likely an overnight camp became a comparatively short and comfortable ride. Duncan tried inwardly to reason away his anxieties, trying to think it possible that in the intricacies of regul motives, these regul were trying to protect them, fearing Stavros’ displeasure if they were lost.

 

He could not convince himself. They were alone with the regul, far from help.

 

They rounded the bend, and saw indeed that there was a regul ship on the ground near their own. They were headed directly for jt. Duncan tugged at the straps in Galey’s hands, took the equipment to himself, all of it, then with a nod to Galey rolled off and landed afoot on the sand, in a maneuver the heavy regul could not have performed.

 

They had covered a considerable distance toward the safety of their own ship before the regul driver .reacted, bringing the sled back about to block their path; and other younglings began to come down the ramp out of the regul ship.

 

“Are you all right? You fell?” asked the regul driver.

 

“No,” said Duncan. “No problem. We are going back to base now. Thank you.”

 

It did not work. The other younglings walked heavily about them, surrounding them, smiling with gaping friendliness and at the same time blocking their way.

 

“Ah,” said Suth Horag-gi, dismounting from the sled. “You take pictures. Mri treasures?”

 

“Property of Stavros,” Duncan said in a clipped tone, and with the dispatch he had learned was humanity’s advantage over the slow-moving regul, he shouldered a youngling, broke the circle, and walked rapidly for the ramp of their own ship, disregarding a youngling that tried to head them off.

 

“Good fortune,” said that one with the proper youngling obsequiousness. “Good fortune you are back safe, kose Sten Duncan.”

 

“Yes, thank you for your concern. My regards to the reverence bai Hulagh.”

 

He spoke in the regul tongue, as the regul had spoken in the human. He shouldered the heavy, awkward youngling with brutal force that to a regul was hardly painful. The push flung it slightly off balance, and he passed it. Galey overtook him on the ramp, almost running. They boarded, found another youngling in the aircraft.

 

“Out,” Duncan ordered. “Please return to your own ship. We are about to go now.”

 

It looked doubtful, and finally, easing past them, performed the suck of air considered polite among regul, smiled that gaping smile and waddled with stately lack of haste down the ramp.

 

Duncan set the gear down on the flooring and hit the switch to lift the ramp the moment the youngling was clear, and Galey shut the door and spun the wheel to seal it.

 

Duncan found himself shaking. He thought that Galey was too.

 

“What did they want?” Galey asked, his voice a note too high.

 

“Check out the ship before we lift,” Duncan said. “Check out everything that could be sabotaged.” And Galev stripped off the breathing mask and the visor and swore softly, staring at him, then flung them aside and set to work, began examining the panels and their inner workings with great care.

 

There was nothing, in the most careful examination, wrong. “Wish we could find something,” Galey said, and Duncan agreed to that, fervently. The regul still waited outside.

 

Galey started the engines and slowly, testing out controls, turned the aircraft and hovered a few feet off the ground, running a course that vengefully dusted the regul craft, passing close enough to send the regul who were outside scrambling and stumbling ponderously toward cover.

 

Senior officer, Duncan should have rebuked that. He did not. He settled into the cushion while the aircraft lifted, his jaw clenched, his hand gripping the cushion with such force that when he realized it, long after they were at altitude enough that they had options if something went wrong, his fingers were numb and there were deep impressions in the cushion.

 

“Game of nerves,” he said to Oaley. “Game of nerves or whatever they were going to do, they didn’t have time.”

 

Galey looked at him. There were the patches of half a dozen worlds on Galey’s sleeve, young as he was. But Galey was scared, and it was a tale that would make the rounds of the regular military of Saber, this encounter with regul.

 

“This is Stavros’ business,” Duncan told him, for Galey’s sake, not for the regul, not even for Stavros. “The less noise made, the better. Take my example.”

 

His reputation was, he knew, widespread among the regulars: the SurTac who had lost his head, who had gone hysterical and accused a high-ranking ally of murder. Doubtless it would stay on his record forever, barring Stavros’ intervention, barring a promotion on Kesrith so high that the record could no longer harm .him and that was at present unlikely.

 

Galey seemed to understand him, and to be embarrassed by it. “Yes, sir,” he said quietly. “Yes, sir.”

 

The lights of Kesrith base came finally into view. They circled the area for the landing nearest Flower, and settled, signalling security with the emergency code. Duncan unstrapped and gathered the photographic equipment from its cushioned ride in the floor locker. Galey opened the hatch and lowered the ramp, and Duncan walked down into the escort of armed human security with a relief so great his knees were weak.

 

Across the field he saw another aircraft come in, close to the Nom side of the airfield, where the regul might be closest to their own authority.

 

A security agent tried to take the equipment from Duncan’s hand. “No,” he said sharply, and for once security deferred.

 

He lost Galey somewhere, missed him in the press and was sorry he had not given some courtesy to the regular who had done so competently; but Flower’s ramp was ahead, the open hatch aglow with lights in the surrounding night. He walked among the security men, into the ship, down the corridors, and to the science section.

 

Boaz waited, white-smocked, anxious. He did not deliver the gear to her directly, for it was heavy, but laid it on a counter. There was nothing for him to do with it thereafter. He had completed his task for the human powers of Kesrith, and sold what the mri counted most valuable in all the world. The knowledge of it, like that of the ovoid that rested here behind voice-locked doors, was in human hands and not in those of regul, and that was, within the circumstances, the best that he could do.

 

Chapter Three

 

THE MAJORITY of Flower personnel were in for the night after the initial excitement of receiving the records. The labs were shut down again, the skeleton night crew on duty. The ship had a different quality by night, a ghostly hush but for the whisper of machinery and ventilation, far different from the frenetic activity in its narrow corridors by day.

 

Duncan found the prospect of a bed, a quiet night in his own safe quarters, a bath (even the chemical scrub allowable under rationing) utterly, utterly attractive, after a three-hour debriefing. It was 0100 by the local clock, which was the time on which he lived.

 

The lateness of the hour did not stop him from descending to the medical section and pausing in Niun’s room. There was neither day nor night for the mri, who lay, slack and deteriorating despite the therapy applied to his limbs, in the influence of sedation. Luiz had promised to consider a lessening of sedation; Duncan had argued heatedly with Luiz on this point.

 

There was no response now when he spoke to the mri. He touched Niun’s shoulder, shook at him gently, hating to feel how thin the mri was becoming.

 

Tension returned to the muscles. The mri drew a deeper breath, moved against the restraints that stayed on him constantly, and his golden eyes opened, half-covered by the membrane. The membrane withdrew, but not entirely. The fixation of the eyes was wild and confused.

 

“Niun,” Duncan whispered, then aloud: “Niun!”

 

The struggle continued, and yet the mri seemed only slightly aware of his presence, despite the grip of his hand. It was another thing, something inward, that occupied Niun, and the wide, golden eyes were dilated, terrified.

 

“Niun, stop it. It’s Duncan. It’s Duncan with you. Be still and look at me.”

 

“Duncan?” The mri was suddenly without strength, chest heaving from exertion, as if he had run from some impossibly far place. “The dusei are lost.”

 

Such raving was pitiable. Niun was a man of keen mind, of quick reflexes. He looked utterly confused now. Duncan held his arm, and, knowing the mri’s pride, drew a corner of the sheet across the mri’s lower face, a concealment behind which the mri would feel more secure.

 

Slowly, slowly, the sense came back to that alien gaze. “Let me go, Duncan.”

 

“I can’t,” he said miserably. “I can’t, Niun.”

 

The eyes began to lose their focus again, to slip aside. The-muscles in the arm began to loosen. “Melein,” Niun said.

 

“She is all right.” Duncan clenched his hand until surely it hurt, trying to hold him to hear that. But the mri was back in his own dream. His breathing was rapid. His head turned from side to side in delirium.

 

And finally he grew quiet again.

 

Duncan withdrew his hand from Niun’s arm and left, walking slowly at first, then more rapidly. The episode distressed him in the strangeness of it; but Niun was fighting the sedation, was coming out of it more and more strongly, had known him, spoken to him. Perhaps it was alien metabolism, perhaps, the thought occurred to him, Luiz had adjusted the level of sedation, more reasonable than he had shown himself in argument on the subject.

 

He went to the main lock, to the guard post that watched the coming and going of all that entered and left the ship. He signed the log and handed the stylus back.

 

“Hard session, sir?” the night guard asked, sympathy, not inquisitiveness. Tereci knew him.

 

“Somewhat, somewhat,” he said, blinked at Tereci from eyes he knew were red, felt of his chin, that was rough. “Message for Luiz when he wakes: I want to talk with him at the earliest.”

 

“Recorded, sir,” said Tereci, scratching it into the message sheet.

 

Duncan started through the lock, expecting it to open for him under Tereci’s hand. It did.

 

“Sir,” Tereci said. “You’re not armed. Regulations.”

 

Duncan swore, exhausted, remembering the standing order for personnel out at night. “Can you check me out sidearms?”

 

“Sign again,” Tereci said, opened a locker and gave him a pistol, waiting while he put his name to another form. “I’m sorry,” Tereci said. “But we’ve had some action around here at night. Regulations aside, it’s better to carry something.”

 

“Regul?” he asked, alarmed at that news, which he had not read in the reports. Regul was all that immediately occurred to him, and had he not been so tired, he would not have been so impolitic.

 

“Animals. Prowling the limits of the guard beams. They never get inside them, but I wouldn’t go out there unarmed. You want an escort, sir? I could get one of the night security ” “‘

“No need,” he said wearily. “No need.” He had come in from the open, and though armed then, he had never thought in terms of weapons. He had walked the land in company with mri. He regarded no warnings of these men that were bound to the safety of Flower and the Nom, who had never seen the land they had come to occupy.

 

They could stand in the midst of Sil’athen and never see it, men of Galey’s breed solid men, decent.

 

Unwondering.

 

He belted on the gun, a heavy weight, an offense to a weary back, and smiled a tired thanks at Tereci, went out into the chill, acrid air. A geyser had blown out irreverently close to Flower. The steam’made the air moist and clouded. He inhaled it deeply, not minding the flavor of it, found it grateful to walk the track by himself, in silence, without Galey. His head ached. He had not realized it before this. He took his time, and found nothing but pleasure in the night, under the larger of Kesrith’s moons, with the air chill and the stars glittering, and far, far across the flats, lights illumined the geysers that spouted almost constantly. The land had become a boiling and impassable barrier, guarding the approaches to the ruins of the mri towers, that only the most intrepid of Boaz’ researchers had scanned from the air.

 

Steel rang under his boots, the gratings that made firm the surface of the causeway. It was the only sound. He stopped, only to have complete silence for a moment, and scanned the whole of the horizon, the glittering waters of the Alkaline Sea, the lights of the city, the steaming geysers, the ridges beyond Flower.

 

Rock scuffed, rattled. The sound seized his heart and held it constricted. He heard it again, spun toward the sound, saw a shadow shamble four-footed down a ridge.

 

It hit the guard beams and shied back, whuffing in alarm. Then it reared up against the sky, twice the height of a tall man, a great, long-clawed beast.

 

The dusei are lost, Niun had said.

 

Duncan stood still, heart pounding. He reckoned the danger posed by these great omnivores, these natives of Kesrith, venom-clawed and powerful enough to rip a man to shreds. This one tried the beam again, again, disliking the sensation, but single-minded in its attempt.

 

A second beast showed on the crest of the slope, coming down-hill. Flower’s spotlights came on, adding to confusion, her hatch open, men pouring out.

 

“Stop!” Duncan shouted. “No farther! Don’t shoot!”

 

The dus tried the beam again, heaved his bulk forward, and this time energies of the defense system played along his great sides, useless. He broke through, reared up and screamed, a moaning, hollow cry that echoed off the walls of Kesrith’s Nom.

 

A rifle beam cut the dark.

 

“Stop shooting!” Duncan shouted.

 

The second beast broke through, a sparkle of light against its sides, a stench of singed fur. They huddled together, the two invaders, backed rump to rump, and kept shifting nervously.

 

Niun’s beasts.

 

Duncan saw them head for the ramp, toward the open door, where the men were saw shots fired. The beasts shied off.

 

“No!” he cried, and the beasts backed, turned and came toward him, snuffing the air. Back at the hatchway, men shouted at him. They could not fire; he was too close to the beasts. Lights played on them, blinding. The dusei, locked into their inquisitive obstinacy, paid no heed. They came, long-clawed feet turned in, claws rattling on the mesh, heads lowered, ursine monsters slope-shouldered, almost comic in their distracted manner.

 

The larger dus nosed at him, sniffed noisily from its pug nose. Duncan stood still, heart pounding so that the blood raced in his veins. The beast nudged him, nothing gentle, and he did not fall; it nosed his hand, investigated it with the mobile center of the lip.

 

And they circled one before him and then the other, shifting position in a strange ballet, constantly between him and the men with the rifles, uttering low, moaning cries. He took his life in pawn and moved, found that they moved with him. He stopped and they stopped.

 

They were surely Niun’s beasts, that had come a long, hard journey from Sil’athen far longer a trek for them than for men’s machines. And with uncanny accuracy they had found Niun, across a hundred miles of desert, and singled out the place that confined him.

 

He had seen dusei and mri work, had watched the beasts react, so sensitive to the voice, the gestures of the mri. He had seen the mri glance at the beast, and the beast react as if some unspoken agreement were between them.

 

He felt them against him, touching, giving him the heat of their vast, velvet-furred bodies. Nearly impossible to kill, the dusei, immune to the poisons of Kesrith’s predators, vastly powerful, gentle and comic in their preoccupied approach to difficulties. He felt himself for a moment dizzy, the closeness of the beasts, their warmth, his exhaustion too much: he was for an instant afraid of the men with their guns, of the lights.

 

He thought of Niun, and there was another blurring, a desire, overwhelmingly strong, warm, determined.

 

The men, the lights, the guns.

 

Terror/ desire/ terror.

 

He blinked, caught himself with a hand against one warm back, found himself trembling uncontrollably. He began to walk, slowly, toward the open doorway, toward the security crew, who had their guns levelled, guns that could do little to a dus’ massive, slow body, much to his.

 

He felt the savor of blood. Of heat.

 

“No!” he said to the dusei. They grew calm.

 

He stopped within easy hailing of the security personnel.

 

“Get out of there,” one called to him. “Get out of there!”

 

“Go back inside,” he said, “and seal all the corridors except the ones that go down to the holds. Give me a way to a safe compartment for them. Make it quick.”

 

They did not stay to argue. Two went inside, to consult with authority, doubtless. Duncan stayed with the dusei, a hand on either broad back, calming them. They sensed Niun and Melein. They knew. They knew.

 

He was safe with them. It was the men with the guns that were to be feared. “Go away from the door,” he wished the remaining security men. “They are no danger to me. They belong to the mri.”

 

“Duncan?” That was Boaz’ female voice, high-pitched and anxious. “Duncan, confound it, what’s going on?”

 

“They’ve come for Niun. They’re his. These creatures are halfway sapient, maybe more than halfway. I want clearance to bring them inside before someone sets them off.”

 

There was a flurry of consultations. Duncan waited, stroking the two massive backs. The dusei had settled down, sitting like dogs. They, too, waited.

 

“Come ahead,” Boaz shouted. “Number one bow hold, equipment bay: it’s empty.”

 

Duncan made to the dusei the low sound he had heard Niun make, started forward. The dusei heaved themselves to their feet and came, casually, as if entering human ships were an ordinary thing. But no human stayed to meet them: even Boaz fled, prudence overcoming curiosity, and nothing greeted them but sealed doors and empty corridors.

 

They walked, the three of them, a long, long descent without lifts, down ways awkward for the big dusei passed with a slow, measured clicking of claws on flooring. Duncan was not afraid. It Was impossible to be afraid, with the like of them for companionship. They had searched him and had no fear of him: though at the back of his mind reason kept trying to urge him that he had been right to be afraid of the beasts, he began to be certain that the beasts were utterly at ease with what he was doing.

 

He came down into the hold, and caressed the offered noses, the thrusting massive heads that, less gentle, could stave in ribs or break his back; and again came that blurred feeling, that surety that he had given mem something that pleased them.

 

He withdrew and sealed the doors, and trembled afterward, thinking what he had done. Food, water, other needs they had none, not at the moment. They wanted in. They had gained that, through him.

 

He fled, fear flooding him. He was panting as he ran the final distance to the medical wing. He saw the door that he wanted closed, like all other doors during the emergency. He opened it manually, closed it again.

 

“Sir?” the sentry on duty asked.

 

“Are they awake?” Duncan asked, with harsh intensity. The sentry looked confused.

 

“No, sir. I don’t think so.”

 

Duncan shouldered past him, opened the door and looked at Niun. The mri’s eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. Duncan went to the bedside and seized Niun’s arm, hard. ‘ “Niun. The dusei. The dusei. They have come.”

 

There was a fine sweat on the mri’s brow. The golden eyes stared into infinity.

 

“They are here,” Duncan almost shouted at him. Niun blinked.

 

“Yes,” said Niun. “I feel them.”

 

And thereafter Niun answered nothing, reacted to nothing, and his eyes closed, and he slept, with a relaxed and tranquil expression.

 

“Sir?” the sentry asked, invading the room contrary to standing orders. “Do you want someone called?”

 

“No,” Duncan said harshly. He edged past the man, walked out into, the corridor, and started for the upper levels of the ship. The intercom came on, the whole ship waking to the emergency just past. He heard that Boaz was paging him, urgently.

 

He did not remember the walk upstairs, the whole of it a blank in his mind when he reached the area of the lock and found Boaz anxiously waiting. He dreaded such lapses, remembering the dizzy blurring of senses that had assailed him before.

 

“They’re domestic?” Boaz asked him.

 

“They seem to be. They are, for the mri. They’re I don’t know. I don’t know.”

 

Boaz looked at him critically. “You’re through for the day,” she said. “No more questions. If they’re bedded down and secure, no questions.”

 

“No one goes down there. They’re dangerous.”

 

“No one is going to go near them.”

 

“They’re halfway sapient,” he said. “They found the mri. Across all that desert and out of all these buildings, they found them.”

 

He was shaking. She touched his arm, blonde, plump Boaz, and at that moment she was the most beautiful and kindly creature in all Kesrith. “Sten, go home,” she said. “Get to your own quarters; get some rest. One of the security officers will walk you. Get out of here.”

 

He nodded, measured his strength against the distance to the Nom, and concluded that he had enough left in him to make it to his room without staggering. He turned, blindly, without a word of thanks to Boaz, remembered nothing until he was out the door and halfway down the ramp with a security man at his side, rifle over one arm.

 

The mental gaps terrified him. Fatigue, perhaps. He wished to believe so.

 

But he had not consciously decided to enter Flower with the dusei.

 

He had not decided.

 

He tore his mind away, far away from the dusei, fighting a giddy return to the warmth that was their touch.

 

Yes, Niun had said, I feel them.

 

I feel them.

 

He talked to the security man, something to drown the silence, talked of banal things, of nonsensical things with slurring speech and no recall later of what he said.

 

It was only necessary, until he was within the brightly lighted safety of the Nom, in its echoing halls that smelled of regul and humans, that there not be silence.

 

The security guard left him at the door, pressed a plastic vial into his hand. “Dr. Luiz advised it,” he said.

 

Duncan did not question what the red capsules were. They killed the dreams, numbed his senses, made it possible for him to rest without remembering anything.

 

He woke the next morning and found he had not turned off the lights.

 

Chapter Four

 

STAVROS, SEATED outside his sled-console, in the privacy of his own quarters, looked like a man who had not slept. There was a thick folder of papers on the desk in front of him, rumpled and read: the labor of days to produce, of a night to read.

 

Duncan saw, and knew that there was some issue of his work, of the hours that he had spent writing and rewriting what he was sure only one man would ever see, reports that did not go to Boaz or Luiz, or even to security: that would never enter the records, if they ran counter to Stavros’ purposes.

 

“Sit down,” Stavros said.

 

Duncan did so, subject to the scrutiny of Stavros’ pale eyes on a level with his own. He had no sense of accomplishment, rather that he had done all that was in him to do, and that it had probably failed, as all other things had failed to make any difference with Stavros. He had labored more over that report than over any mission prep he had ever done; and even while he worked he had feared desperately that it was all for nothing, that it was only something asked of him as a sop to his protests, and that Stavros would discard it half-read.

 

“This mri so-called shrine,” said Stavros. “You know that the regul are disturbed about it. They’re frightened. They connect all this mri business in their thinking: the shrine, the artifact, the fact that we’ve taken trouble to keep two mri alive and your influence, that not least. The whole thing forms a design they don’t like. Do you know the regul claim they rescued you and Galey?”

Duncan almost swore, smothered it, “Not true.”

 

“Remember that to a regul your situation out there may have looked desperate. A regul could not have walked that distance. Night was coming on, and they have a terror of the dark in the open wilderness. They claim they spotted the grounded aircraft and grew concerned for your safety that they have been trying to watch over our crews in their explorations, for fear of some incident happening which might be blamed on them.”

 

“Do you really believe that, sir?”

 

“No,” said Stavros flatly. “I rather put it down to curiosity. To Hulagh’s curiosity in particular. He is mortally afraid of what the mri might do, afraid of anything that has their hand in it. I think he’s quite obsessed with the fear that some may survive and locate him. I am being frank with you. This is not for conversation outside this room. Now tell me this: was there any touching, any overt threat from the regul you encountered?”

 

“No hand laid on us. But our property “

 

“I read that.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“You handled it well enough,” said Stavros, a slight frown on his face. “I think, though, that it does indicate that there is a certain interest in you personally, as well as in the mri relics. I think it was your presence drew them out there. And if I hadn’t put Galey out there with you, you could have met with an accident. You neglected precautions.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“They’ll kill you if they can. I can deal with it after it happens, but I can’t prevent it, not so long as you’re within convenient reach of them. And why this shrine, Duncan? Why this artifact?”

 

“Sir?”

 

“Why do yon reckon it was so important? Why did the mri risk their lives to go to that place and fetch it?”

 

Duncan gestured vaguely to the report that lay on the desk. “Religion. I explained “

 

“You’ve been inside that so-called shrine. Fve seen the pictures you brought out. Do you really believe that it’s a place of worship?”

 

“It’s important to them.” He was helpless to say anything else. Other conclusions lay there in the photographs: computer banks, weaponry, communications all such possibilities as regul would dread, as allies of the regul would have to fear.

 

“You’re right: it’s important to them. Boaz has cracked your egg, Duncan. Three days ago. The artifact is open.”

 

It shook him. He had thought it unlikely that if it were to be opened, it would need mri help, cooperation, that might be negotiated. But Boaz’ plump hands, that worked with pinpoint probe and brush, with all the resources of Flower’s techs at her command they had succeeded, and now the mri had nothing left that was their own.

 

“I hadn’t thought it would be possible that soon,” Duncan said. “Does the report say what it was?”

 

“Is. What it is. Boaz says it was designed for-opening, no matter of difficulty to someone with the right technique, and some assurance that it was not a weapon, which I understand your pictures provided. It’s some sort of recording device. The linguistic part of it is obscure some sort of written record is there; and there’s no one fluent in the mri language to be able to crack the script. For obvious reasons we don’t want to consult with the regul. But there’s numerical data there too, in symbols designed to be easily deciphered by anyone: there was even a key provided in graphics. Your holy object, Duncan, and this so-named shrine, are some kind of records-storage, and they wanted it badly, wanted it more than they wanted to survive. What kind of record would be that important?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

“Numerical records. Series of numerical records. What sort of recording device does that suggest to you?”

 

Duncan sat silent a moment. In his limited experience only one thing suggested itself. “Navigational records,” he said at last, because Stavros waited, determined to have such an answer.

 

“Yes. And is that not a curious thing for them to want, when they had no ship?”

 

Duncan sat and considered the several possibilities, few of them pleasant to contemplate.

 

“It knocks out another idea,” Stavros said, ” that the mri were given all their technology by the regul: that they weren’t literate or technologically sophisticated on their own.” He picked up a photo that lay face-down on the desk, pushed it across, awkward in the extension of his arm. “From the artifact, ten times actual size.”

 

Duncan studied it. It showed a gold plate, engraved with symbols, detail very complex. It would have been delicate work had the original been as large as the picture.

 

“Plate after plate,” said Stavros. “Valuable for the metal alone. Boaz theorizes that it was not all done by one hand, and that the first of that series is very old. Techniques of great sophistication or of great patience, one or the other, and meant to last. Fm told the mathematics are intricate; they’ve gone to computer to try to duplicate the series to navigational tape, and to try to match it out with some reference point. Even so it seems beyond our capabilities to do a thorough analysis on it. We may have to resort to the labs at Haven, and that’s going to take time. A great deal of time. But you maintain you had no idea what it was you had.”

 

“No, sir.” He met Stavros’ eyes without flinching, the only defense he could make. “I didn’t know then and I’m not even sure now that the mri knew; maybe they were sent by their own authorities, and had no idea why. But I’ll agree it’s highly likely that they knew.”

 

“Can you get it out of them?”

 

“No. No. I don’t think so.”

 

“They seem to have expected a ship if this tape is what it appears to be.”

 

“I don’t think they did. They wanted offworld, yes, but they expected nothing. That’s an emotional judgment, based on the general tone of things they said and did, but I believe it.”

 

“Possibly a very valid judgment. But they may not commit ypur error, Duncan, of seeing all regul as alike. The mri dealt specifically with doch Holn; Alagn is Holn’s rival; and Holn … does have ships.”

 

Cold settled from brain to stomach. The argument was plausible. “Yes, sir,” Duncan said softly. “But it would be a matter of contacting them.”

 

“The so-called shrine is a possibility.”

 

“No,”

 

“Another emotional judgment?”

 

“The same judgment. The mri are finished. They knew it.”

 

“So says Alagn; so, perhaps, said your mri. Perhaps neither is lying. But regul sometimes do not say all they know. Perhaps mri don’t, either. Perhaps we haven’t asked the right questions.” Hand trembling, Stavros lifted a cup and drank, set it down again. “The mri are mercenaries. Are yours for hire?”

 

The question set him aback. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

 

“I think the regul as a whole fear that. I think that is one of several things Hulagh desperately fears, that having lost possession of the mri, he might find humankind possessing them. And using them. What is their usual price, do you know?”

 

“I don’t know.” He looked at Stavros, found that curious, half-mocking manner between him and the truth. He laid the picture down on the desk. “What are you proposing?”

 

“I’m not. I’m just wondering how well you profess to know them.”

 

“It wasn’t a thing we discussed.” , ,

“According to your records, you’re a skilled pilot.”

 

He looked at Stavros blankly.

 

“True?” Stavros asked.

 

“If the record says so.”

 

“Elag/Haven operations required some interstellar navigation.”

 

“I had a ship automated to the hilt. I can handle in-system navigation; but everything in transit operations was taped.”

 

“That is rather well what we’re dealing with here, isn’t it?”

 

Duncan found nothing to say for several moments.

 

“Does all this come together somehow?” he asked finally. “What is it you’re really asking?”

 

‘Take the mri in charge. Take the artifact, the egg. You say that you can handle the mri. Or is that so, after all?”

 

Duncan leaned back in his chair, put distance between himself and the old man, drew several slow breaths. He knew Stavros, but not, he thought suddenly, well enough.

 

“You have doubts?” Stavros asked.

 

“Any sane man would have doubts. Take the mri and do what? What is this about navigation?”

 

“I’m asking you whether you really think yon can handle the mri.”

 

“In what regard?”

 

“Whether you can find out more than that report of yours tells me. Whether you can find some assurance for Kesrith that the mri are not going to be trouble, or that Holn does not have its hands on more of them.”

 

Duncan leaned forward again and rested his arms on the front of Stavros’ desk, knowing full well that there was deception involved. He looked Stavros in the eyes and was sure of it, bland and innocent as Stavros’ expression was. “You’re not influenced by my advice. You’re going to send me off blind, and there’s somethina else going on. Can I know what that is? Or do I guess at it?”

 

They had lived close, had shared, he and the old man; he leaned on that fact desperately, saw offense and a slow yielding in Stavros’ expression. “Between us,” Stavros said.

 

“Between us.”

 

Stavros frowned, a tremor of strain in his lips. “I want the mri off Kesrith, immediately. I’m sending Flower up to station, where it can proceed about its work unhindered. The regul are getting nervous about the mri since your visit to Sil’athen. And a regul ship incoming is not an impossibility in the near future. Hulagh says his doch will be getting anxious because he’s failed his schedule with a ship that Was entrusted to him by their central organization: its loss is going to be a heavy blow to Alagn. And he’s worried. He constantly frets on the topic of misunderstandings, demands a way offworld to meet his ships. If we have regul ships incoming, I don’t want any of ours caught on the ground. I think moving Flower aloft will minimize any chance of an incident. Saber and Hannibal together have shields sufficient to protect the station and the probe ships if there should be a problem. But with the mri anywhere accessible to the regul, there could easily be a problem. The regul have a panic reaction where it concerns mri.”

 

“I’ve seen it at work,” Duncan said bitterly.

 

“Yes,” said Stavros. “The bai has asked repeatedly about the artifact. I daresay the bai does not sleep easily. If you had at your disposal a ship, the mri, and the egg, Duncan, do you think you could find out the nature of that record?”

 

Duncan let out his breath slowly. “Alone?”

 

“You would have the original artifact. The mri would doubtless insist on it; and we have duplicated the object in holos so we wouldn’t be risking more than the museum value of the object, considerable though that may be. Under the circumstances it’s a reasonable risk.” Stavros took a long drink, rested the cup on the desk with a betraying rattle of pottery. His breath came hard. “Well?”

 

“Tell me plainly,” Duncan said, “what the object of this is. How far. Where. What options?”

 

“No certainties. No clear promises. If the mri go for Holn assistance, you’ll lose the ship, your life whatever. I’m willing to gamble on your conviction they won’t. You can find out what that tape is and maybe maybe deal with the mri. You tell me. If you think it’s impossible, say so. But going the route of the computers at Haven will take months, a year with the regul-mri question hanging over us here at Kesrith, and ourselves with no idea what we’re facing. We need to know.”

 

“Andiflrefusedr

“Your mri would die. No threat: you know the way of it We can’t let them go; they’d get the regul or the regul would get them. If we keep them as they are, they’ll die. They always have.”

 

It was, of course, the truth.

 

“More than that,” said Stavros, “aD of us are sitting on the line here at Kesrith. And there’s the matter of the treaty, that involves rather more than Kesrith. You appreciate that, I’m sure. You say you can reason with them. You’ve said that all along. I’m giving you your chance.”

 

“This wasn’t in the contract. I didn’t agree to any offworld assignments.”

 

Stavros remained unmoved. Duncan looked into his eyes, fully aware what the contract was worth in colonial territory that in fact his consent was only a formality.

 

“It is a SurTac’s operation,” said Stavros finally. “But back out if you don’t think you can do it.”

 

“A ship,” Duncan said.

 

“There’s probe Fox. Unarmed. Tight quarters too, if there should be trouble aboard. But one man could handle her.”

 

“Yes, sir. I know her class.”

 

“Boaz is finishing up on the holos now. Flower is going up to the station this afternoon, whatever you decide. If you “have to have time to think about it, a shuttle can run you up to the station later, but don’t plan to take too long about a decision.”

 

“Ill go.”

 

Stavros nodded slowly, released a long breath. “Good,” he said, and that was all.

 

Duncan arose, walked across the room to the door, looking back once. Stavros said nothing, and Duncan exited with resentment and regret equally mixed.

 

There was a matter of gear to pack, that only. He had lived all his life under those conditions. It would take about five minutes. .

 

Regul stared at him as he walked the hall to his room, were still interested when he walked back with his dunnage slung over his shoulder carrying a burden, which neither regul nor mri would do: the regul not without a machine, and the mri never.

 

They flatly gaped, which in regul could be smiles, and, he thought, they were smiles of pleasure to realize that he was leaving.

 

The mri’s human, he had heard them call him, and mri was spoken as a curse.

 

“Good-bye, human,” one called at him. He ignored it, knowing it was not for friendliness that they wished him farewell.

 

There was a moment of sadness, walking the causeway outside. He paused to look toward the hills, with the premonition that it was for the last time.

 

A man could not wholly love Kesrith: only the dusei might do that. But hereafter there was only the chill, sterile environment of ships, where there was no tainted wind, no earth underfoot, and Arain was a near and therefore dangerous star.

 

He heaved his baggage again to his shoulder, walked the ringing mesh to the lowered ramp. They expected him. He signed aboard as personnel this time, a feeling unfamiliar only because there was not the imminent prospect of combat. Old anxieties seized on him. Ordinarily his first move would be for whatever rider vessel he had drawn, to begin checking it out, preparing for a drop into whatever Command had decreed for him.

 

“Compartment 245,” the duty officer told him, giving him his admitted-personnel tag: silly formality, he had always thought, where personnel were few enough to be known by sight to everyone on Flower. But they were headed for station, for a wider world, where two great warships, two probes, and an in-system rider mingled crews. He attached the tag, reckoning numbers. He was assigned near the mri. He was well satisfied with that, at least.

 

He went there, to ride through lift with them.

 

Chapter Five

 

THE STATION was a different world indeed regul-built, a maze of tbe spiraling tunnels favored by the sled-traveling regul. Everything was automated.

 

And strangest of all, there were no regul.

 

To walk among humans only, to hear their talk, to breathe the air breathed by humans, and never to be startled by the appearance of an alien face in all this vast space: it was like being cast across light years; and yet Kesrith’s rusty surface was only a shuttle flight away: the screens showed it, a red crescent.

 

The screens likewise showed the ships that clustered about the station Saber foremost, a kilometer-long structure that was mostly power, instrumentation, and weaponry and surprisingly scant of crew, only two hundred to tend that monster vessel. Shields made her strong enough to resist attack, but she would never land onworld. Flower and Fox had ridden in attached to Saber’s sides, as Santiago had ridden the warship Hannibal, like diminutive parasites on the flanks of the warships, although Flower and Fox were independently star-capable. Presently the probe ships were docked almost unnoticed in the black shadow of Saber. Flower had snugged into the curve to berth directly under the long ship, and from her ports and scanners there was very little visible but Saber and the station itself.

 

And the station, vast, complexly spiral, rolled its way about Kesrith, a curious dance that dizzied the mind to consider, as one walked the turning interior.

 

Most personnel made use of the sleds. The distances inside the station were considerable, the sleds novel and frighteningly rapid, whirling round the turns with reckless precision, avoiding collisions by careful routing at hairbreadth intervals.

 

Duncan walked, what of a walk was possible in the less than normal g of the station that was planned for regul comfort. The giddy feeling combined with the alien character of the corridors and the sight of Kesrith out of reach below, and fed his depression.

 

“That’s the one that came in off the desert,” he heard someone say behind his back. It finished any impulse he had toward mingling with these men, that even here he was a curiosity, more out of place than he was ever wont to be among regulars. He was conscious of the mask of tan that was the visible mark of the kel’en’s veil, worn in the burning light of Arain; he felt his face strangely naked in their sight, and felt their stares on him, a man who had lived with humanity’s enemy, and spoke for them.

 

On the first evening there was leisure for Flower personnel to have liberty, he wandered into the station mess . . . found Galey, whose face split into a broad and friendly grin at the sight of him; but Galey, of Saber, was with some of Saber’s officers, his own friends, and Duncan found no place with them, a SurTac’s peculiar rank less than comfortable in dealing with officers of the regular forces. He ate alone, from the automated bar, and walked alone back to Flower.

 

He had done his tour of the station. It was enough. He had no interest even in seeking out the curiosities of the regul architecture, that the men of the warships seemed to enjoy on their hours of liberty.

 

He went into Flower’s lock, into familiarity, hi among men he knew, and breathed a sigh of relief.

 

“Worth seeing, sir?” the duty officer asked him, envious: his own liberty had been deferred. Duncan shrugged, managed a smile; his own mood was not worth shedding on the regulars of Flower. “A bit like the Nom,” he answered. “A curiosity. Very regul.”

 

And he received from the man’s hand a folded message of the kind that passed back and forth frequently at the desk.

 

He started back toward the level of his own quarters, unfolding the message as he walked.

 

It was Boaz’ hand. Urgent I talk with you. Lab #2.B.

 

Duncan crumpled it in his hand and stuffed it into his pocket, lengthening his stride: the mri program and an urgency; if running would have put him there appreciably faster he would have run.

 

Number two lab contained Boaz’ office. She was there, seated at her desk, surrounded by paper and a clutter of instruments. She looked up at him as he entered. She was upset, blue eyes looking fury at the world. Her mouth trembled.

 

“Have a seat,” she said, and before he could do so: “Saber’s troops moved in; snatched the mri, snatched the artifact, the mri’s personal effects, everything.”

 

He sank into the offered chair. “Are they all right?”

 

“I don’t know. Yes. Yes they were all right. They were set into automeds for the transfer. If they just leave them in them, they’ll fare well enough for a while. Stavros’ orders. Stavros’ orders, they said.” She picked up a sealed cylinder from the center of the littered desk and gave it to him with a misgiving stare. “For you. They left it.”

 

He received the tube and broke the seal, eased out the paper it contained and read the message to himself. Conditions as discussed apply. Contingency as discussed has occurred. Observe patience and discretion. Stand by. Destroy message. Stavros.

 

Regul troubles: ship incoming. The mri were going out, off-station, and himself with them, soon enough. He looked sadly at Boaz, wadded the message in his hand, pocketed it; he would dispose of it later.

 

“Well?” asked Boaz, which she surely knew she should not ask; he stayed silent. She averted her eyes, pursed her lips, and laced her fingers under her plump chin. “I belong to a ship,” she said, “which is unfortunately under the governor’s authority in some degree, where it regards putting us offworld or seizing what pertains to declared hostiles. For now, in those regards, that authority is absolute. I personally am not under his orders, and neither is Luiz. I shouldn’t say this freely; but I will tell you that if you are personally not satisfied with the treatment of the mri there can be a protest filed at Haven.”

 

Brave Boaz. Duncan looked at her with an impulse of guilt in his heart. There was no word from her of canceled programs, interrupted researches, the seizure of work on which she had labored with such care. The mri themselves occurred to her. This was something he had not foreseen; and yet it was like her.

 

“Boz,” he said, the name the staff called her. “I think everything is all right with them.”

 

She made a noncommittal sound, leaned back. She said nothing, but she looked a little relieved.

 

“They didn’t take the dusei, did they?” he asked.

 

Boaz smiled suddenly, gave a fierce laugh. “No. The beasts wouldn’t sedate. They tried. There was no way they would go down into that hold with them. They asked Flower staff to do it, got rather high-handed about it; and Luiz told them they could go down for themselves and throw a net over them. There were no volunteers.”

 

“I don’t doubt,” Duncan said. ‘Td better get down there and see about them.”

 

“You can’t tell me what this business is.”

 

“No. I’m sorry.”

 

She nodded, shrugged. “You can’t tell me whether things are likely to reverse themselves.”

 

“I don’t think they will.”

 

Again she nodded. “Well,” she said sadly. That was all.

 

He took his leave of her and walked out, through the lab that was, he saw, in a disorder that had nothing to do with research, small items that had been on the shelves now gone, books missing.

 

Saber’s men had been thorough.

 

But if they had taken the mri from the ship, then the dusei might pine and die, like one that he had seen grieving over a dead mri, a beast that would not leave for any urging.

 

He took that downward corridor that led him to the hold. His stomach was already knotting in dread, remembering what they could do in distress. He had been among them since that first night, brought them food and water, and they had reacted to that with content. But now they had been disturbed by strangers, attacked; and the fear of that feeling that had possessed him once was as strong as any fear of venomed claws.

 

The sensation did not recur. He entered the hold high on the catwalk, looked down at the brown shapes that huddled below, and cautiously descended to them, fearing them and determined not to yield to it. The regul avowed that the dusei thrived on synthetic protein, which was abundant enough in the station stores; that they would, in fact, eat anything they were offered, which presumably included humans and regul, as he had heard Luiz remark. The air was remarkably fresh, a clean though occupied aroma to the hold, not so pronounced as with the fastidious regul. The beasts were very neat in their habits, and remarkably infrequent in their necessary functions, metabolizing fluids in such a fashion that Boaz and Luiz found exceedingly intriguing, with a digestion that exacted fluids and food value from anything available of vegetable or animal tissue, and gave off practically no waste compared to the bulk they had ingested and that quite dry. Regul information on them was abundant, for regul ships had kept kel’ein and dusei for many years. Dusei seemed to go dormant during long confinement, once settled and content. In general dusei put less demand on a ship’s life-support than humans, mri, or regul. It was the awesome size of them that made them uncomfortable companions, the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing that could be done should one of them run amok.

 

Duncan stepped from the last tread of the stairs, saw both dusei rise with a keening moan that echoed throughout the deep hold. They stood shoulder to shoulder, nostrils working, smelling the stranger. Their small eyes, which were perhaps not overly keen, glittered in the light. The larger of them was a ragged, scarred beast: this one Duncan took for Niun’s own; and he thought he also knew the smaller, sleek one for a one-time companion of theirs.

 

The big one shambled forward with his pigeon-toed gait, looked Duncan up and down and rumbled a deep purring that evinced pleasure in the meeting. The smaller one came,, urgently thrusting with its broad nose at Duncan’s leg.

 

He sat down on the last steps between them, and the big animals settled in an enormous mass about his feet, so that they touched. He stroked the velvet-furred hides remarkably pleasant, that velvet-over-muscle. There was no sound at all but the rumbling of the dusei, a monotonous, peaceful sound.

 

They were content. They accepted him, accepted a human because of Niun, because they had known him in Niun’s company, he thought, although they had disdained his touch while Niun was there. When once he had attempted escape, the dusei had hunted him, had cornered him, all the while pressing at him with such terror as he began to understand was a weapon of theirs.

 

I wonder that they did not kill you, Niun had said that night.

 

Duncan wondered now that they rested so calmly after what had been done to them, after humans bad tormented them, trying to sedate them; but the dusei’s metabolism absorbed poisons, and perhaps absorbed the drug. There was no evidence of harm to them, not even any of disturbance in their manner.

 

Neither men nor fully animal, the dusei, but four-footed half-lings, shadow-creatures, that partook of the nature of both . . . that offered themselves to the mri, but were not taken: they were companions of the mri, and not property. He doubted that humanity could accept such a bargain. The regul could not.

 

He sat content, touching, being touched, and calm; he had not known that night whether admitting the dusei to the ship was right: now it seemed very right. He found himself suddenly full of warmth he was receiving. He knew it all at once, knew the one that so touched him, the small one, the small one that was still more than three times the bulk of a big man. It purred with a steady, numbing rhythm, leached passion from him as water stole the salts of Kesrith from the soil and displaced them seaward.

 

It drowned them, overwhelmed them.

 

He drew back suddenly, panicked; and this the dusei did not like. They snorted and withdrew. He could not recover them. They stood and regarded him, apart, with small and glittering eyes.

 

Cold flooded into him, self-awareness.

 

They had come of their own accord, using him: they wanted and he had given them access; and still he needed them, them and the mri, them and the mri….

 

He gathered himself and scrambled up the narrow stairs, sweating and tense when he gained the safety of the catwalk. He looked down. One of them reared up, tall and reaching with its paws. Its voice shook the air as it cried out.

 

He hurled himself for the other side of the door and sealed and locked it, hands shaking. It was not rational, this fear. It was not rational. They used it. It was a weapon.

 

And they were where they wanted to be now: at a station orbiting Kesrith, and near the mri. He had done everything they wanted. He would do it again, because he needed them, needed the calming influence they might exert with the mri, who drew comfort from them, who relied on them. He began to suspect variables beyond his reckoning.

 

But he could not leave them. The thoughts wound him in upon himself, parric-fear and the gut-deep certainty of something wrong. He realized that he had been greeted by a man in the corridor some ten paces back, and absently turned and tried to amend the discourtesy, but it was too late; the man had walked on. Duncan enfolded himself in his private turmoil and kept walking, hands in his pockets, wadding into smaller and smaller balls the messages he had thrust there, Boaz’ and Stavros’.

 

Confound you, Niun, he thought violently, and wondered if he were sane for the mere suspicion he entertained. The dusei, whatever they were, could not touch his conscious thoughts; it was at some lower level they operated, something elemental and sensual and sensory possible to reject if a man could master his fear of them and his need of them: that was surely the wedge they used for entry, fear and pleasure, either one or the other. It felt very good to please a dus; it was threatening to annoy one.

 

Yet the researchers had not picked it up. There was nothing of the kind reported in their observations of the beasts.

 

Perhaps the beasts had not spoken to them.

 

Duncan closed the door to his own small quarters, opposite the now-vacant compartments of the mri, and began packing, folding up the clothes that he had scarcely unpacked.

 

When he had done, he sat down in the chair by his desk and keyed in a call to Saber by way of Flower’s communications.

 

Transfer of dusei possible and necessary, he sent to Saber’s commander.

 

Stand by, the message came back to him. And a moment later: Report personally Saber Command soonest.

 

Chapter Six

 

THERE WAS nothing remarkable about a SurTac boarding a military ship; there should not have been, but the rumors were flying among the crew. Duncan surmised that by the looks that slid his way as he was escorted up to Command: escorted, not allowed’to range at will, to exchange words with crewmen. Even the intercom was silent, an unusual hush on a ship like Saber.

 

He was shown into the central staff offices, not a command station, and directly into the presence of the ranking commander over military operations in the Kesrithi zones, R.A. Koch. Duncan was uneasy in the meeting. SurTacs had paper rank enough to assure obedience from the run of regulars, and that circumstance was bitterly resented, the more so because the specials flaunted those privileges with utter disdain for the protocols and dignity of regular officers: the gallows bravado of their short-lived service. He did not expect courtesy; but Koch’s frown seemed from thought, not hostility, the ordinary expression of his seamed face.

 

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, SurTac Duncan.” The accent was Havener, like most that had come to Kesrith, the fleet of lately threatened Elag/Haven.

 

“Sir,” he said; he had not been invited to sit down.

 

“We’re on short schedule,” Koch said. “Regul have a ship incoming, Siggrav. Fortunately it seems to be a doch Alagn ship. Bai Hulagh’s warning them to mind their manners; and we’re probably going to have them docking here. They’re skittish. Get yourself and your mri clear as quickly as possible. You’re going to be given probe Fox. Probably your instructions are clearer than mine are at the moment.” A prickle of distrust there, resentment of Stavros: Duncan caught it clearly. “Fox is transferring crew at the moment: some upset there. Siggrav is still some distance out. Your end of this operation is a matter of go when ready.”

 

“Sir,” said Duncan. “I want the dusei. I can handle them; I’ll see to transferring them to Fox. I also want the mri trade goods that are stocked on-station, whatever you can spare me help to load.”

 

Koch frowned, and this time it was not in thought. “All right,” he said after a moment. “I’ll put a detail on it now.” He looked long at Duncan, while Duncan became again conscious that his face was marked with half a tan, that the admiral saw a stranger in more than one sense. Here was a power equal to that of Stavros, adjunct, not under Stavros’ authority save where it regarded political decisions: and the decision that took Fox from Koch’s command and overmanned Koch’s own ship with discontent, lately transferred crew and scientists did not sit well with Koch. He did not look like a man who was accustomed to accept such interference.

 

“I’ll be ready, sir,” Duncan said softly, “when called.”

 

“Best you go over to Fox now and settle in,” said Koch. “Getting her underway would relieve pressure here. You’ll have your supplies; we’ll provide what assistance we can with the dusei. All haste appreciated.”

 

“Thank you, sir,” Duncan said. Dismissed, he took his leave, picked up his escort again at the door.

 

Koch had spent forty years on the mri, Duncan reckoned; he looked old enough to have seen the war from its beginning, and he doubtless had no love for the species. No Havener, who had seen his world overrun by regul and recovered by humanity at great cost, could be looked upon to entertain any charity toward the regul or toward the mri kel’ein who had carried out their orders.

 

The same could be said, perhaps, of Kiluwans like Stavros; but remote Kiluwa, on humanity’s fringes, had produced a different breed, not fighters, but a stubborn people devoted to reason and science and analyzing a little, it had to be suspected, like the regul themselves. Overrun, they dispersed, and might never seek return. The Haveners were easier to understand. They simply hated. It would be long before they stopped hating.

 

And from the war there were also men like himself, thousands like himself, who did not know what they were, or from what world: war-born, war-oriented. War was all his life; it had made him move again and again in retreating from it, a succession of refugee creches, of tired overworked women; and then toward it, in schools that prepared him not for trade and commerce but for the front lines. His own accent was unidentifiable, a mingling of all places he had lived. He had no place. He had for allegiance now nothing but his humanity.

 

And himself.

 

And, with considerable reservations, the Hon. G. Stavros.

 

He exited Saber’s ramp onto the broad dock, his escort left behind, paused to look about at the traffic of men and women busy about their own concerns.

 

Haveners.

 

Regulars.

 

In the command station of Fox, Duncan found himself among Fox’s entire body of officers, unhappy-looking men and women, who exchanged courtesies with dutiful propriety.

 

“Sealed orders,” the departing captain told him. “Crewless mission. That’s as much as we know.”

 

“I’m sorry about this,” Duncan offered, an awkward condolence.

 

The captain shrugged, far less, doubtless, than the unfortunate man was feeling, and offered his hand. “We’re promised another probe, incoming. Fox is a good ship, in good maintenance a little chancy in atmosphere, but a good ship, all the same. We’re attached to Saber, and Saber’s due that replacement probe as soon as it’s ferried in; so we’ll get it, sure enough. So congratulations on your command, SurTac Duncan; or my condolences, whichever are more in order.”

 

Duncan accepted the handshake, in his mind already wondering what was contained in the sealed courier delivery that had come back by shuttle and resided now in the hands of the departing captain of Fox in his own possession, once the passing of authorities was complete. Duncan accepted the courtesies all about, the log was activated a last time to record the transfer of command; and then, which was usual on SurTac missions, the log files were stripped and given over into the hands of the departing captain. There would be none kept on his flight.

 

Another, last round of ceremonies: he watched the officers and their small crew depart the ship, until there was no one left but the ever-present security detail at the hatch four men, with live and deadly arms.