After a moment he proceeded: “Are you the only Chereionite anybody has ever met?”
“Occasional Merseians have visited my planet, even resided there for periods of study,” Aycharaych pointed out.
Yes. Flandry remembered one such, who had endangered him here upon Talwin; how far in the past that seemed, and how immediately near! I realize why the coordinates of your home are perhaps the best-kept secret in the Roidhunate. I doubt if a thousand beings from offworld know; and in most of them, the numbers have been buried deep in their unconsciousness, to be called forth by a key stimulus which is also secret.
Secret, secret … What do we know about you that is substance and not shadow?
The data fled by, just behind his eyes.
Chereion’s sun was dim, as Flandry himself had discovered when he noticed Aycharaych was blind in the blue end of the spectrum though seeing farther into the red than a man can. The planet was small, cold, dry—deduced from Aycharaych’s build, walk, capabilities, preferences—not unlike human-settled Aeneas, because he could roam freely there and almost start a holy war to split the Empire, nineteen years ago.
In those days he had claimed that the enigmatic ruins found upon many worlds of that sort were relics of his own people, who ranged and ruled among the stars in an era geologically remote. He claimed … He’s as big a liar as I am, when either of us wants to be. If they did build and then withdraw, why? Where to? What are they upon this night?
Dismiss the riddles. Imperial Intelligence knew for certain, with scars for reminders, he was a telepath of extraordinary power. Within a radius of x meters, he could read the thoughts of any being, no matter how alien, using any language, no matter how foreign to him. That had been theoretically impossible. Hence the theory was crudely modified (there is scant creativity in a waning civilization) to include suggestions of a brain which with computerlike speed and capacity analyzed the impulses it detected into basic units (binary?), compared this pattern with the one which its own senses and knowledge presented, and by some incredible process of trial and error synthesized in seconds a code which closely corresponded to the original.
It did not seem he could peer far below the surface thoughts, if at all. That mattered little. He could be patient; or in a direct confrontation, he had skill to evoke the memories he wanted. No wonder that the highest Merseian command paid heed to him. The Empire had never had a more dangerous single enemy.
Single—
Flandry grew aware of the other’s luminous regard. “ ’Scuse me,” he said. “I got thinking. Bad habit.”
“I can guess what.” Aycharaych’s smile continued. “You speculate whether I am your sole Chereionite colleague.”
“Yes. Not for the first time.” Flandry drank again. “Well, are you? What few photographs or eyewitness accounts we’ve garnered, of a Chereionite among outsiders—never more than one. Were all of them you?”
“You don’t expect me to tell you. I will agree to what’s obvious, that partakers in ephemeral affairs, like myself, have been rare among my race. They laid such things aside before your kind were aught but apes.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“In action I find an art; and every art is a philosophical tool, whereby we may seek to win an atom deeper into mystery.”
Flandry considered Aycharaych for a silent span before he murmured: “I came on a poem once, in translation—it goes back a millennium or more—that’s stayed with me. Tells how Pan—you know our Classical myths—Pan is at a riverside, splashing around, his goat hoofs breaking the lilies, till he plucks a reed and hollows it out, no matter the agony it feels; then the music he pipes forth enchants the whole forest. Is that what you think of yourself as doing?”
“Ah, yes,” Aycharaych answered, “you have the last stanza in mind, I believe.” Low:
Damn! Flandry thought. I ought to stop letting him startle me.
“My friend,” the other went on gently, “you too play a satanic role. How many lives have you twisted or chopped short? How many will you? Would you protest me if the accidents of history had flung Empire rather than Roidhunate around my sun? Or if you had been born into those humans who serve Merseia? Indeed, then you might have lived more whole of heart.”
Anger flared. “I know,” Flandry snapped. “How often have I heard? Terra is old, tired, corrupt, Merseia is young, vigorous, pure. Thank you, to the extent that’s true, I prefer my anomie, cynicism, and existential despair to counting my days in cadence and shouting huzza—worse, sincerely meaning it—when Glorious Leader rides by. Besides … the device every conqueror, yes, every altruistic liberator should be required to wear on his shield … is a little girl and her kitten, at ground zero.”
He knocked back his cognac and poured another. His temper cooled. “I suspect,” he finished, “down inside, you’d like to say the same.”
“Not in those terms,” Aycharaych replied. “Sentimentality ill becomes either of us. Or compassion. Forgive me, are you not drinking a trifle heavily?”
“Could be.”
“Since you won’t get so drunk I can surreptitiously turn off your mindscreen, I would be grateful if you stay clear-headed. The time is long since last I relished discourse of Terra’s former splendors, or even of her modern pleasures. Come, let us talk the stars to rest.”}
In the morning, Flandry told Susette he must scout around the globe a few days, using certain ultrasensitive instruments, but thereafter he would return.
He doubted that very much.
X
Shadow and thunder of wings fell over Kossara. She looked up from the rolling, tawny-begrown down onto which she had come after stumbling from the forest. Against clouds and the plum-colored sky beyond, a Diomedean descended. She halted. Weariness shivered in her legs. Wind slithered around her. It smelled of damp earth and, somehow, of boulders.
An end to my search. Her heart slugged. But what will I now find? Comrades and trust, or a return to my punishment?
The native landed, a male, attired in crossbelts and armed with a knife and rifle. He must have been out hunting, when he saw the remarkable sight of a solitary human loose in the wilds, begrimed, footsore, mapless and compassless. He uttered gutturals of his own tongue.
“No, I don’t speak that,” Kossara answered. The last water she had found was kilometers behind. Thirst roughened her throat. “Do you know Anglic?”
“Some bit,” the native said. “How you? Help?”
“Y-yes. But—” But not from anybody who’ll think he should call Thursday Landing and inquire about me. During her trek she had sifted the fragments of memory, over and over. A name and nonhuman face remained. “Eonan. Bring me Eonan.” She tried several different pronunciations, hoping one would be recognizable.
“Gairath mochra. Eonan? Wh … what Eonan? Many Eonan.”
There would be, of course. She might as well have asked a random Dennitzan for Andrei. However, she had expected as much. “Eonan who knows Kossara Vymezal,” she said. “Find. Give Eonan this.” She handed him a note she had scrawled. “Money.” She offered a ten-credit bill from the full wallet Flandry had included in her gear. “Bring Eonan, I give you more money.”