"It might even be deadly if their skin lacks the necessary protective pigmentation," Malina said.
Rok Wllon arrived, accompanied by his klo interpreter. This new development was explained to him, and he exclaimed jubilantly, "Supreme was right! Supreme always is right!" He turned to Malina. "Now all you have to do is cure them, and our problem is solved. They might even forgive the horrible behavior of your children."
"Why would they want to be cured?" Malina asked. "If their condition evolved naturally, it'll be highly advantageous to an underground life. They certainly wouldn't want to make such a drastic change just so one of them could occasionally attend a gesardl meeting, or look at flowers in the park, without protective clothing. Probably most of the population never come to the surface”. She turned to Miss Schlupe. "Do you want to come with me?"
"Where?" Miss Schlupe asked.
"To the gesardl. I feel a solemn obligation to pay my respects to the body of this native my children murdered."
"Good idea," Miss Schlupe said. She asked Darzek, "Do you want to come?"
He shook his head. "I've invited some traders in to see my recordings."
They started toward the transmitter. Then Malina turned and called, "Mr. Darzek. Thank you!"
He nodded and smiled. E-Wusk was emitting a low rumble, which meant that he was chuckling to himself. Rok Wllon was regarding them with what looked remarkably like panic.
The gesardl consisted of fifty variegated life forms, ranging in appearance from the diminutive klo member to several mountainous masses of quivering flesh. They filled fifty of the fifty-one elevated places around the circumference of their circular meeting room in the mushroom top of the arena column. The fifty-first, the empty place, was the one occasionally occupied by a native observer. Entrance to the room was through the transmitter frame that stood at its center.
Miss Schlupe and Malina took positions near the transmitter, and, with Miss Schlupe translating into the mart language, Malina began with a simple, polite request - to pay their respects to the dead. After several exchanges, she was flatly accusing the gesardl of collaborating in a monstrous conspiracy, and the gesardl members J1ad attained a state of consternation that far out-rivaled Rok Wllon's.
"I think we're hitting pay dirt," Malina said, looking about the room. "Tell them there's no possible way the children could have killed or even injured that native, and we insist on seeing him." Miss Schlupe did. "Tell them," Malina said, "that Montura is the only world in two galaxies where the request would not be honored as a matter of course. We want to know why simple principles of justice are denied here. We demand to see that native!" Miss Schlupe did.
Eventually a messenger was dispatched. Malina and Miss Schlupe kept their places in front of the transmitter. Miss Schlupe had told the gesardl that no one else was leaving until the native was produced, and they meant that. The gesardl would have to pass over or through them or sit where it was until the native appeared.
They waited.
The messenger returned, with nothing to report except that the message had been delivered. The atmosphere of consternation became more intense. "I think," Miss Schlupe observed, "that the gesardl isn't used to the idea of natives coming when summoned. I think it's usually the other way around."
But that time the natives came when summoned.
Two of them emerged from the transmitter and stepped around Malina and Miss Schlupe before they were aware of their presence. One went directly to the circle's vacant seat. The other remained standing near the transmitter.
The native sitting with the gesardl spoke directly to Miss Schlupe, articulating the common language in sonorous, bell-like intonations. Miss Schlupe listened with increasing indignation.
Finally she turned to Malina. "This character," she said, pointing to the native who stood near them, "is our lately lamented professor of botany."
Malina stared at her. "You mean - he's the one the children are supposed to have murdered?"
"That's what the other character said." "What kind of a farce is this?"
"That's what I intend to find out," Miss Schlupe said grimly.
It was the allegedly deceased professor's turn. He told his story at some length, speaking a similarly sonorous intonation but a different language. The klo member of the gesardl translated, and then Miss Schlupe translated the klo's translation.
"He saw one of the children throw stones," Miss Schlupe said, "but he paid no attention. He did not see the throwing of the stone that hit him, but others did. Evidently it knocked him out. When he came to, it hurt very much."
"Please convey my apologies and sympathy for the hurt," Malina said. "Then ask the rat where the stone hit him."
The question, relayed by Miss Schlupe and the klo translator, brought an answering gesture: squarely on top of the head.
"Please convey my congratulations on his rapid and complete recovery," Malina said icily.
Comment and reply traveled the same route. The professor suffered acute headaches for some time after the incident, but now he was fully recovered.
"Ask him," Malina said, "why he has made himself a party to this outrageous accusation of murder when there has been no murder. There has not even been a serious injury."
Miss Schlupe translated. The klo translated. This time the answer came from the native who sat with the gesardl.
Miss Schlupe was thunderstruck. "He says," she translated, "that there clearly was a murderous intent. And Monturan law makes no distinction between the intention and the deed."
15
Their fury of indignation carried them as far as the Prime Common, where they burst from the transmitter, with Miss Schlupe calling, "Mr. Darzek - " and froze in horror. They stood in an urban street, and the dead lay about them in widening puddles of purpling ooze.
Belatedly Malina remembered that Jan Darzek was having some traders in to view his recordings. So realistic was the sickening detail that when Malina and Miss Schlupe scuttled out of the projection they gingerly stepped around bodies and puddles. The two gesardl secretaries following them stumbled and fell in their attempt to keep their multiple feet unsoiled.
But there were no traders. The audience consisted only of E-Wusk and some assistants. The perplexed and horrified resident delegation of gesardl secretaries had withdrawn to the room's perimeter and was viewing the projection surreptitiously while pretending to ignore it.
Jan Darzek sat poised at the edge of the projection. He had fashioned a comfortable chair for himself by placing a low stool beside a high hassock, which gave him a back to lean against, but he was leaning forward with his eyes fixed hypnotically, wholly oblivious to anything except the simulated tragedy.
"Where are the traders?" Miss Schlupe asked.
"They did not come," E-Wusk said. "They are afraid they will be interdicted, too, if they associate with us."
"The cowards!" Miss Schlupe said scornfully. "The cowardly idiots!" She added, making it sound like an afterthought, "Our mission here is ruined, I suppose."
"Rok Wllon thinks if we were to turn the children over to the gesardl immediately - "
"Nonsense. Rok Wllon is another cowardly idiot. Anyway, how can we turn over what we don't have?" She was watching Jan Darzek. "He's been seeing this sort of thing for months - watching it happen, watching worlds and waiting for it to happen - no wonder he's aged!"
The projection changed: another world, another life form dying horribly in its frenzied flight from nothing to nowhere. Malina asked bewilderedly, "What causes it?"
"The Udef," E-Wusk said. "The Unidentified Death Force." "That's a fancy way of saying no one knows," Miss Schlupe said. E-Wusk continued soberly, "Gul Darr says that when it touches a world every large life form is doomed. Not one individual escapes. His scientists studied it and analyzed it and performed every test they could think of, and they had no more notion of what it is now than they had in the beginning. It's invisible. The only sounds they've dete
cted are the screams of its victims. It's odorless and tasteless. The scientists built instruments sensitive enough to detect a puff of smoke in the atmosphere of a world, but the Udef doesn't have that much substance. Scientifically it doesn't exist, and yet it murders the population of any world it touches."
Malina looked again at Jan Darzek, who remained hypnotically engrossed in the projection. He had come to Montura in pursuit of a will-O'-the-wisp in the form of a tantalizing hint from Supreme because everything else he had tried had failed utterly. He was not a man accustomed to failing, and to fail in this, when so many innocent lives, so many worlds, were being destroyed was killing him. No wonder he looked ill.
Even if Supreme's hint had substance behind it, Darzek was about to fail again because Malina's children had murdered a native. Except that they hadn't.
E-Wusk, too, had aged. If his friend Gul Darr told him all the intelligent life in the universe was threatened, he had to believe it, and what he had seen in the recordings had shocked him out of his lamentations about being unable to trade. He had been studying a star projection upon which the known route of the Udef had been traced. "So many worlds destroyed," E-Wusk ruminated. "So many doomed. Perhaps all of them - all of us - are doomed."
Miss Schlupe, always interested in practical information, asked, "How long will it take it to get here?"
"The velocity seems unpredictable," E-Wusk said. "It rushes, it dawdles, it overlooks worlds and goes back for them, it makes leaps, it zigzags forward and backward. But over a period of time it seems to cut an enormous swath straight through a galaxy”.
"Then it could be here shortly."
"Gul Darr doesn't think that likely, but he won't say it's impossible. Who could know what is impossible for a thing like this?"
"Every scientist in two galaxies ought to be recruited to work on it," Miss Schlupe said. "This galaxy should be alerted immediately. Gul Darr must show his recordings to the gesardl. It's possible to make the gesardl sit and pay attention to something. We just proved that."
"The members of the gesardl come from only thirty-nine different worlds," E-Wusk said. "Their activities are concentrated here. They have very little status except on Montura. We must reach traders who have strong links with their home planets - strong enough so that when they describe the unbelievable, they will be believed. Still, there would be no harm in showing it to the gesardl, and if the gesardl is willing to watch, then perhaps the other traders would be willing to watch also. What have you two been up to?"
They told him of their experience in confronting the murdered native. E-Wusk said meditatively, "If their law makes no distinction between the intention and the deed, whoever enforces the law has to make a presumption of intent. I wave my hand in your direction. Is it a threatening gesture, or just a gesture, or is my hand really en route to scratching an itch on my back? If I have a murderous intent, is it directed to you or at the itch? And what if the person making such a presumption has a murderous intent of his own? I don't remember ever encountering such a premise before."
"It's a legal absurdity," Miss Schlupe said. "We've simply got to get the children away from Montura."
"To be sure," E-Wusk said and added blandly, "If we can find out where they are."
"It wouldn't hurt to have a plan ready," Miss Schlupe said, dropping her voice. "Do you have any idea how it could be done?"
"It would be difficult, because the gesardl controls all the transportation."
"Think about it," Miss Schlupe said. "See if you can find a way to do it." URSDwad had joined them. Miss Schlupe said to him, "Do you have an extra projector?"
He did.
"Could you make a selection of recordings and Gul Darr's scientific data? I'd like to present them to the kloatraz. It may have data relevant to the Udef, and even if it doesn't we can ask it to evaluate Gul Darr's materials. That could be a help in persuading the traders to cooperate."
"I'll get them ready," URSDwad said.
They went to their apartment with URSDwad, and for once the gesardl secretaries did not follow. The projections they were trying not to watch had mesmerized them. While USRDwad rummaged through his luggage, Malina and Miss Schlupe sat in the lounge and whispered.
"I've thought and thought," Miss Schlupe said. "If we could get a message up to our ships - which we can't, I've tried - or if one of the other traders would help us - which none of them would, they're all frightened - or if Mr. Darzek has a technician on this ship that brought him from the Lesser Galaxy, and we could get him down here - but we can't. What I'm trying to say is that if we had a transmitter frame, or if we could fix the transmitter in our common so it would connect with a transmitter on one of the ships, or something like that, then we could transmit the kids up to a ship and escape with them."
"Would they let the ship leave?" Malina whispered back. "No, but I'm sure the captain could find a way around that. Maybe it could make a transmitting leap from its berth or just leave without permission. The problem is to get them up there, but I can't think of a way to send a message. A transmitting frame can be put down by point transmission, but that's a touchy and very conspicuous operation and anyway we couldn't arrange to have it done without sending a message. I just don't know. Do you want to come to the Kloa Common with me?"
"I've nothing else to do except take a steam bath," Malina said, "and I've already had two today."
"Isn't that overdoing the cleanliness bit, even for a doctor?"
Malina whispered her plot to misdirect the gesardl's attention to the bath lounge, and Miss Schlupe whispered back that it was difficult and even risky to try to outguess an alien because his mental process worked in peculiar ways - the gesardl might become interested in the places she stayed away from, rather than the places she visited, and perhaps it was time Malina came to the column and helped her straighten out her books.
"I hope so!" Malina exclaimed. "I'll think about it."
"What happened to the arena revolt over closing the refreshment stand?" ...
"It petered out," Miss Schlupe said disgustedly. "They're nothing but a pack of cowards."
URSDwad came in with the projector, some recordings, and the scientific data in a convenient carrying case, and they left for the Kloa Common. Two of the secretaries made the distasteful rush through the projection to follow them. Malina's parting glimpse of Jan Darzek was of an ashen-faced man staring at the death of yet another world.
Miss Schlupe told Arluklo what she wanted, and he summoned some of his fellows and quickly cleared away cubicles to form an open space near the kloatraz. Miss Schlupe set up the projector and began to play the recordings. One doomed population after another poured forth to die horribly between the kloa's cubicles.
The enormity of the thing defied Malina's comprehension, but even if it had not, she had no interest in comprehending. She was much too filled with worry about the fate of her children to be concerned about the fate of distant worlds long since dead, and she had seen enough of Jan Darzek's recordings. She turned her attention to the Kloa Common.
Except for Arluklo and a few others who were assisting him, the kloa came and went in their usual scurrying numbers and paid no attention to the projection. The kloatraz, too, seemed to be conducting the common's trading business as usual, but Malina reminded herself that a massive computer could handle hundreds or perhaps thousands of jobs at the same time.
For a time she speculated as to how it was handling this particular job. Did it have cameras concealed somewhere beneath that creamy white surface? Or was Miss Schlupe correct in thinking that the kloa communicated with it telepathically, which meant that it was viewing the projection through the eyes of Arluklo and his fellow kloa.
She tried to imagine how such an enormous object had been constructed. One infinitesimally fine layer at a time, probably, the wayan oyster secreted a pearl. More likely, a layer of microscopic, infinitely complicated circuitry, alternated with layers of creamy white insulation, spraye
d or dipped. The construction would have been as much a work of genius as the design - the product of an age, rather than a moment, like a Gothic cathedral: a slow, unhurried accumulation of technology reflected in the slow, unhurried growth of that immense, creamy whiteness with its dazzling complexity of internal flickerings, its flashing and exploding lights. Occasionally the illumination seemed to change subtly in hue, becoming slightly reddish when a number of lights came on at the same time.
Suddenly she remembered that Supreme, who had thought up this incomprehensible mission for her - for all of them - also was a computer. Had Supreme sent a mission to Montura merely to get in touch with the kloatraz? She suppressed a giggle. Had it used the tragic urgency of the Udef threat as an excuse to send love letters?
An abrupt change in the nature of the projection made her turn to it again. Now it was showing a visual survey of one of Darzek's ships that had been caught by the Udef as it orbited a doomed world. Malina looked once, carefully, and turned away.
[Jan Darzek 03] - This Darkening Universe Page 16
