Tanub wilted. “The city,” he whispered. Presently, he said: “Send me to my people. I will discuss what I have learned with ... our ... council.” He stared at Orne and there was respect in his manner. “You I-As are too strong ... too strong. We did not suspect this.”
***
Chapter Seven
Because the earliest Psi sensations came upon mankind from the unknown, primitive emotional associations with Psi were those of fear and the maya projection of false realities, of incubi and witches and warlocks and sabbats. These associations are bred into us and our kind has a strong tendency to recapitulate the old mistakes.
—HALMYRACH, ABBOD OF AMEL,
Psi and Religion
In the wardroom of Stetson’s scout cruiser, the lights were low, the chairs comfortable and close to a green-beige table set with crystalate glasses and a decanter of dark Hochar brandy.
Orne lifted his glass, sipped the liquor. He said: “For a while there I thought I’d never again be tasting anything as lovely as this.”
Stetson poured a glass of the brandy for himself, said: “ComGo heard the whole thing over the monitor net. D’you know you’ve been breveted to senior fieldman?”
“They’ve recognized my sterling worth at last,” Orne said. As he spoke, he found the bantering lightness of his own words disturbing. He tried to recapture an elusive memory—something about primitive gardening, about tools ...
A wolfish grin spread over Stetson’s big features. “Senior fieldmen last about half as long as the juniors,” he said. “Very high mortality.”
“I might’ve known,” Orne said. He took another sip of the brandy, his thoughts going to the fate of the Gienahns, of the Hamalites: military occupation. Call it I-A necessity, call it preventative surveillance—it still spelled control-by-force.
Stetson flicked the switch of his cruiser’s master recorder system, said: “Let’s get it on record.”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Who authorized you to offer the Gienahns limited membership in the Galactic Federation?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“But junior fieldmen do not originate such offers.”
“ComGo objects?”
“ComGo was telling me to authorize it when you jumped the gun. They weren’t on your net, were they?”
“No ... no, they weren’t.”
“Tell me, Orne, how’d you tumble to where the hidden the Delphinus? We’d already made a quick scan of the moon and it didn’t seem possible the try to hide it up there.”
“It had to be there. Tanub’s word for his people was Grazzi. Most sentients call themselves something meaning ‘The People.’ But in his tongue, that’s Ocheero. There was no such word as Grazzi on our translation list. I started working on it. There had to be a conceptual superstructure here with direct relationship to the animal shape, to the animal characteristics—just as there is with us. I felt that if I could get at the conceptual models for their communication, I had them. I was working under life-and-death pressure and, strangely, it was their lives and their deaths that concerned me.”
“Yes, yes, get on with it,” Stetson said.
“One step at a time,” Orne chided. “But on solid ground. By that time, I knew quite a bit about the Gienahns. They had wild enemies in the jungle, creatures much like themselves who lived in what might be enviable freedom. Grazzi. Grazzi. I wondered if it might not be a word adopted from another language. What if it meant ‘enemy?’”
“I don’t see where this is leading,” Stetson said.
“It is leading us to the Delphinus.”
“That ... that word told you where the Delphinus was?”
“No, but it fitted the creature pattern of the Gienahns. I’d felt from our first contact that the Gienahns might have a culture similar to that of the Indians on ancient Terra.”
“You mean with castes and devil worship, that sort of thing?”
“Not those Indians. The Amerinds, the aborigines of wilderness America.”
“What made you suspect this?”
“They came at me like a primitive raiding party. The leader dropped right onto the rotor hood of my sled. It was an act of bravery, nothing less than counting coup.”
“Counting what?”
“Challenging me in a way that put the challenger in immediate peril. Making me look silly.”
“I’m not tracking on this, Orne.”
“Be patient; we’ll get there.”
“To how you learned where they secreted the Delphinus?”
“Of course. You see, this leader, this Tanub, identified himself immediately as High Path Chief. That wasn’t on our translation list either. But it was easy: Raider Chief. There’s a word in almost every language in our history to mean ‘raider’ and deriving from a word for road or path or highway.”
“Highwayman,” Stetson said.
“‘Raid’ itself,” Orne said. “It’s a corruption of an ancient human word for road.”
“Yeah, yeah, but where’d all this …”
“We’re almost home, Stet. Now, what’d we know about them at this point? Glassblowing culture. Everything pointed to the assumption that they were recently emerged from the primitive. They played into our hands then by telling us how vulnerable their species survival was—dependent upon the high city in the sunlight.”
“Yeah, we got that up here. It meant we could control them.”
“Control’s a bad word, Stet. But we’ll skip it for now. You want to know about the clues in their animal shape, their language and all the rest of it. Very well,” Tanub said their moon was Chiranachuruso. Translation: ‘The Limb of Victory.’ When I had that, it all fell into place.”
“I don’t see how.”
“The vertical slit pupils of their eyes.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means night-hunting predator accustomed to dropping upon its prey from above. No other type of creature has ever had the vertical slit in its light sensors. And Tanub said the Delphinus was hidden in the best place in all of their history. For that to track, the hiding place had to be somewhere high, very high. Likewise, dark. Put it together: a high place on the dark side of Chiranachuruso, on ‘The Limb of Victory.’”
“I’m a pie-eyed greepus,” Stetson whispered.
Orne grinned at him. “I won’t agree with you ... sir. The way I feel right now, if I said it, you might turn into a greepus. I’ve had enough nonhuman associates for a while.”
***
Chapter Eight
“It is by death that life is known,” the Abbod said. “Without the eternal presence of death there can be no awareness, no ascendancy of consciousness, no withdrawal from the gridded symbols into the void-without-background.”
—ROYALI’s Religion for Everyone,
Conversations with the Abbod
They called it the Sheleb Incident, Stetson noted, and were happy that the I-A suffered only one casualty. He thought of this as his scout cruiser brought the casualty back to Marak. A conversation with the casualty kept coming back to him.
“Senior fieldmen last about half as long as the juniors. Very high mortality.”
Stetson uttered a convoluted Prjado curse.
The medics said there was no hope of saving the field agent rescued from Sheleb. The man was alive only by an extremely limited definition. The life and the definition depended entirely upon the womblike crechepod which had taken over most of his vital functions.
Stetson’s ship stood starkly in the morning light of Marak Central/Medical Receiving, the casualty still aboard waiting for hospital pickup. A label on the crechepod identified the disrupted flesh inside as having belonged to an identity called Lewis Orne. His picture in the attached folder showed a blocky, heavy-muscled redhead with off-center features and the hard flesh of a heavy planet native. The flesh in the pod bore little resemblance to the photo, but even in the flaccid repose of demideath, Orne’s unguent-smeared b
ody radiated a bizarre aura.
Whenever he moved close to the pod, Stetson sensed power within it and cursed himself for going soft and metaphysical. He had no theory system to explain the feeling, thus dismissed it with a notation in his mind to consult the Psi Branch of the I-A just in case. Likely nothing in it ... but just in case.
There’d be a Psi officer at the medical center.
A crew from the medical center took delivery on the crechepod and Orne as soon as they got port clearance. Stetson, moving in his own shock and grief, resented the way the medical crew worked with such casual and cold efficiency. They obviously accepted the patient more as a curiosity than anything else. The crew chief, signing the manifest, noted that Orne had lost one eye, all the hair on that side of his head—the left side as noted in the pod manifest—had suffered complete loss of lung function, kidney function, five inches of the right femur, three fingers of the left hand, about one hundred square centimeters of skin on back and thigh, the entire left kneecap and a section of jawbone and teeth on the left side.
The pod instruments showed that Orne had been in terminal shock for a bit over one hundred and ninety elapsed hours.
“Why’d you bother with the pod?” a medic asked.
“Because he’s alive!”
The medic pointed to an indicator on the pod. “This patient’s vital tone is too low to permit operative replacement of damaged organs or the energy drain for regrowth. He’ll live for a while because of the pod, but …” And the medic shrugged.
“But he is alive,” Stetson insisted.
“And we can always pray for a miracle,” the medic said.
Stetson glared at the man, wondering if that had been a sneering remark, but the medic was staring into the pod through the tiny observation port.
The medic straightened presently, shook his head. “We’ll do what we can, of course,” he said.
They shifted the pod to a hospital flitter then and skimmed off toward one of the gray monoliths which ringed the field.
Stetson returned to his cruiser’s office, an added droop to his shoulders that accentuated his usual slouching stance. His overlarge features were drawn into ridges of sorrow. He slumped into his desk chair, looked out the open port beside him. Some four hundred meters below, the scurrying beetlelike activity of the main port sent up discordant roarings and clatterings. Two rows of other scout cruisers stood in lines just outside the medical receiving area—gleaming red and black needles. Part of the buzzing activity down there would be ground control getting ready to shift his cruiser into that waiting array of ships.
How many of them stopped first in this area to offload casualties? Stetson wondered.
It bothered him that he didn’t possess this information. He stared at the other ships without really seeing them, seeing only the dangling flesh, the red gaps in Orne’s body as it had been when they transferred him from Sheleb’s battered soil to the crechepod.
He thought: It always happens on some routine assignment. We had nothing but a casual suspicion about Sheleb—the fact that only women held high office. A simple, unexplained fact and I lose one of my best agents.
He sighed, turned to his desk and began composing the report: “The militant core on the planet Sheleb has been eliminated. (Bloody mess, that!) Occupation force on the ground. (Orne’s right about occupation forces: For every good they do, they create an evil!) No further danger to Galactic peace expected from this source. (What can a shattered and demoralized population do?)
“Reason for Operation: (Bloody stupidity!) R&R—after two months of contact with Sheleb—failed to detect signs of militancy.
“Major indicators: (The whole damn spectrum!)
“1.) A ruling caste restricted to women.
“2.) Disparity between numbers and activities of males and females far beyond the Lutig norm!
“3.) The full secrecy/hierarchy/control/security syndrome.
“Senior Field Agent Lewis Orne found that the ruling caste was controlling the sex of offspring at conception (see details attached) and had raised a male slave army to maintain its rule. The R&R agent had been drained of information, replaced with a double and killed. Arms constructed on the basis of that treachery caused critical injuries to Senior Field Agent Orne. He is not expected to survive. I am hereby recommending that Orne receive the Galaxy Medal and that his name be added to the Roll of Honor.”
Stetson pushed the report aside. That was enough for ComGo. The commander of galactic operations never went beyond the raw details. The fine print would be for his aides to digest and that could come later. Stetson punched his call box for Orne’s service record, set himself to the task he most detested: notifying next of kin. He studied the record, pursing his lips. “Home Planet: Chargon. Notify in case of accident or death: Mrs. Victoria Orne, mother.”
He scanned through the record, reluctant to send the hated message. Orne had enlisted in the Federation Marines at age seventeen standard (a runaway from home) and his mother had given post-enlistment consent. Two years later: scholarship transfer to Uni-Galacta, the R&R school here on Marak. Five years of school, one R&R field assignment under his belt, and he had been drafted into the I-A for brilliant detection of militancy on Hamal. Two years later—a crechepod!
Abruptly, Stetson hurled the service record at the gray metal wall across from him; then he got up, brought the record back to his desk. There were tears in his eyes. He flipped the proper communications switch, dictated the notification to Central Secretarial, ordered it transmitted Priority One. He went groundside then and got drunk on Hochar brandy, Orne’s favorite drink.
The next morning there was a reply from Chargon: “Lewis Orne’s mother too ill to be notified or to travel. Sisters being notified. Please ask Mrs. Ipscott Bullone of Marak, wife of the High Commissioner, to take over for family.” It was signed: “Madrena Orne Standish, sister.”
With some misgivings, Stetson called the Residency for Ipscott Bullone, leader of the majority party in the Federation Assembly. Mrs. Bullone took the call with blank screen. There was a sound of running water in the background.
Stetson stared into the grayness swimming in his desk screen. He always disliked blank screens. His head ached from the Hochar brandy and his stomach kept insisting this was an idiot call. There had to be a mistake.
A baritone husk of a voice came from the speaker beside the screen: “This is Polly Bullone.”
Telling his stomach to shut up, Stetson introduced himself, relayed the Chargon message.
“Victoria’s boy dying? Here? Oh, the poor thing! And Madrena’s back on Chargon—the election. Oh, yes, of course. I’ll get right over to the hospital.”
Stetson signed off with thanks, broke the contact. He leaned back in his chair, puzzled. The High Commissioner’s wife! He felt stunned. Something didn’t track here. He recalled it then: The First Contact! Hamal! A blunderbrain named Andre Bullone!
Using his scrambler, Stetson called for the follow-up report on Hamal, found that Andre Bullone was a nephew of the High Commissioner. Nepotism began on high, obviously. But there was no apparent influence in Orne’s case. A runaway in his teens. Brilliant. Self-motivated. Orne had denied any knowledge of a connection between Andre Bullone and the High Commissioner.
He was telling the truth, Stetson thought. Orne didn’t know about this family connection.
Stetson continued scanning the report. A mess! The nephew had been transferred to a desk job far back in the bureaucracy: report juggler. There was a green check mark beside the transfer notice, indicating pressure from on high.
Now—a family linkup between Orne and the Bullones.
Still puzzled, but unable to see a way through the problem, Stetson scrambled an eyes-only memo to ComGo, then turned to the urgent list atop his work-in-progress file.
***
Chapter Nine
As the mythological glossary developed our first primitive understanding of Psi, a transformation occurred. Out of the grimoire came
curiosity and the translation of fear into experiment. Men dared explore this terrifying frontier with the analytical tools of the mind. From these largely unsophisticated gropings arose the first pragmatic handbooks out of which we developed Religious Psi.
—HALMYRACH, ABBOD OF AMEL,
Psi and Religion
At the I-A medical center, the oval crechepod containing Orne’s flesh dangled from ceiling hooks in a private room.
There were humming sounds in the dim, watery green of the room, and rhythmic chuggings, sighings, clackings. Occasionally, a door opened quietly and a white-clad figure would enter, check the graph tapes on the crechepod’s instruments, examine the vital connections, then depart.
In the medical euphemism, Orne was lingering.
He became a major conversation piece at the interns’ rest breaks: “That agent who was hurt on Sheleb, he’s still with us. Man, they must build those guys different from the rest of us! … Yeah. I heard he only has about one-eighth of his insides—liver, kidneys, stomach, all gone ... Lay you odds he doesn’t last out the month ... Look at what old sure-thing Tavish wants to bet on!”
On the morning of his eighty-eighth day in the crechepod, the day nurse entered Orne’s room for her first routine check. She lifted the inspection hood, looked down at him. The day nurse was a tall, lean-faced professional who had learned to meet miracles and failures with equal lack of expression. She was just here to observe. The daily routine with the dying (or already dead) I-A operative had lulled her into a state of psychological unpreparedness for anything but closing out the records.
Any day now, poor guy, she thought.
Orne opened his only remaining eye and she gasped as he said in a low whisper: “Did they clobber those dames on Sheleb?”
“Yes, sir!” the day nurse blurted. “They really did, sir!”
“Another damn mess,” Orne said. He closed his eye. His breathing-simulation deepened and heart-demand increased.