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 had 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 halflings, 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, panic-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 spoke 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 ov
er 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.
There was quiet. Duncan settled into the unfamiliar cushion and keyed in the command that played the once-only tape from Stavros: under security lock as it was, it was destroying itself as it played.
Such procedures assured that Authority would not have records coming back to haunt them: that had been the saying during the war, when SurTacs routinely expected the destruction of all records that dealt with them, records destroyed not alone for fear of the enemy, but, they bitterly suspected, destroyed to keep clear the names of men that sent them into the field, should a mission fall: losing commanders lost commands.
Stavros’ face filled the screen.
“My apologies,” Stavros said softly, “for what I am about to ask. I will make my proposal; and after hearing it, if you wish, you can return command of Fox, and accept temporary assignment at the station, pending stabilization of the situation here.
“By now you are in command of Fox. You are authorized to take the mri aboard, along with all their possessions, and the artifact. The probe will be equipped according to your requirements. In your navigation storage is one tape, coded zero zero one. It comes from the artifact. Proceed out on a course farthest removed from incoming regul, and maintain secrecy as much as possible. You are to follow, the tape to its end. There will be no choice once the tape is activated; the system will be locked in. Gather what data you can, both military and personal, on the mri: that is the essence of your mission. Deal with them if possible. We grow more and more certain that it is in our interests to understand that tape. In those interests we are prepared to take a considerable risk. You will gather data and establish what agreement is possible with the mri.
“If you have decided by now to withdraw, wait until the end of this tape and contact Saber. If you have, on the other hand, decided to continue, make all possible haste.
“You will in either case say nothing of the contents of this taped message. You will exercise extreme caution in making records during your flight. We want nothing coming home with you by accident. You will have an armed self-destruct, and you will operate under no-capture priorities. If to the best of your judgment you have entered a situation which would deliver your ship into hostile hands, destruct. This is imperative. Whatever choice you make, whether accepting or rejecting this mission, is a free choice. You may refuse without prejudice.”
The tape ran out. Duncan still sat staring at the gray screen, knowing that he wanted to refuse, go back to Kesrith, make his peace with the authorities—find some safe life in the Kesrithi hills.
He did not know by what insanity he could not. Perhaps it was something as selfish and senseless as pride; perhaps it was because he could not envision a use for himself thereafter—except perhaps to open the backlands to human habitation. And the world would change.
He cut the screen off, gazed around at the little command station that would be his for what might be the rest of his life, with which he could live for a little time. It was enough.
* * *
He boarded Flower with no change of insignia, nothing visible to indicate the change in circumstances; but the officers of Flower had been informed, evidently, of the authorizations granted him, for there was no demur when he asked the transfer of his gear and for preparations on the dockside.
And when he had done so, he went to Luiz, and last of all to Boaz.
It was the hardest thing, to break to her the news that all her labors were without issue so far as security would ever let her know, that he was taking her charges from her permanently—he, who had assisted her, and now returned to the military wing that she hated.
“Reasons are classified,” he said. “I’m sorry, Boaz. I wish I could explain.”
Her broad face was touched with a frown. “I think I have an idea what’s toward. And I think it’s insane.”
“I can’t discuss it.”
“Do you know what you’ve let yourself in for?”
“I can’t discuss it.”
“Are they going to be all right? Are you yourself content with arrangements for them?”
“Yes,” he said, disturbed that she seemed to guess so accurately what was in progress: but then, Boaz had done the researches on the artifact. Doubtless many on Flower had an idea—and surmised after one fashion and another what the military would do with the information they had found. He suffered the scrutiny of her eyes for a moment, guilty as if he were betraying something; and he did not know what power had claimed him—whether friends or enemies of Boaz’ principles—or what he himself served, whether she would understand that, either.
She smiled sadl
y, a mask that covered other feelings. “Well,” she said, “hard for us, but there’s nothing to be done for it. Sten, take care.” The smile died. “Take care for yourself. I’m going to worry about you.”
He was touched by this, for if he had a friend anywhere about Kesrith, it was Boaz, fortyish and the only ranking woman in the civ sector. He took her by the hands and, on an impulse, by the shoulders and kissed her on the side of the mouth.
“Boz, I’m going to miss you.”
“I will have to get myself some new dusei,” she said. Tears were very close to the surface. “I imagine you’ll be taking them, too.”
“Yes,” he said. “Be careful of those beasts, Boz.”
“Watch yourself,” she urged him hoarsely. For a moment it seemed she might say something further. At last she glanced down and aside, and together they set about the necessary business of arranging the transfer of the dusei.
* * *
The whole section was closed to foot traffic and all movement down the rails was halted while the transfer was being made—the matter of sealed canisters of supplies and Duncan’s own uninteresting baggage first; and then the mri, from Saber, in the sealed automeds used in evacuations of wounded—not a man on the docks that could not guess who was being moved under such extraordinary security; but the precautions were as much to protect the mri as to conceal their removal. Mri were bitterly hated, and the looks that followed those sealed units were in many cases murderous.
And lastly, the docks entirely cleared, came the dusei, for whom no such protective confinement was practical. Duncan had consulted much with Boaz on the question of their transfer, considered using freight canisters, and finally, all such possibilities discarded, simply directed everyone to clear the corridors, ordered the loading crews behind sealed doors, and had the hatches opened.
Then he went down to meet the dusei, and touched them and soothed them, disturbed by their disturbance, fighting his own fear—and he felt their eagerness too, when he opened the door that let them completely free.
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