“We are not sure. How far do you go?”
“Clear to the Linn, this trip. Solstice comes near, our Season of Returnings.”
“Fortunate for us, if I happen to have cash enough on my person to buy that long a passage for two.” Erannath touched his pocketed apron.
I have none, Ivar thought. Fraina swittled me out of everything, surely knowin’ I’d have to leave Train. Only, did she have to provoke my leavin’ so soon? He paid no attention to the dickering.
“—well,” Erannath finished. “We can come along to the end of the river if we choose. We may debark earlier.”
Riho Mea frowned behind an acrid blue veil. “Why might that be?” she demanded. “You understand, sirs, I have one ship to worry about, and these are much too interesting times.”
“Did I not explain fully enough, last night when I arrived on board? I am a scientist studying your planet. I happened to join a nomad group shortly after Rolf Mariner did—for reasons about which he has the right not to get specific. As often before, violence lofted at the carnival. It would have led either to his death at nomad hands, or his arrest by the Bosevilleans. I helped him escape.”
“Yes, those were almost your exact words.”
“I intended no offense in repeating them, Captain. Do humans not prefer verbal redundancy?”
“You miss my course, Sir Erannath,” she said a touch coldly. “You have not explained enough. We could take you on in emergency, for maybe that did save lives. However, today is not one such hurry. Please to take refreshment, you both, as I will, to show good faith. I accuse you of nothing, but you are intelligent and realize I must be sure we are not harboring criminals. Matters are very skittly, what with the occupation.”
She laid her cigar in an ashtray, crunched a cookie, slurped a mouthful of tea. Ivar bestirred himself to follow suit. Erannath laid claws on a strip of meat and ripped it with his fangs. “Good,” said the woman. “Will you tell your tale, Sir Mariner?”
Ivar had spent most of the day alone, stretched on his bunk. He didn’t care what became of him, and his mind wasn’t working especially well. But from a sense of duty, or whatever, he had rehearsed his story like a dog mumbling a bone. It plodded forth:
“I’m not guilty of anything except disgust, Captain, and I don’t think that’s punishable, unless Impies have made it illegal since I left. You know, besides bannin’ free speech, they razed McCormac Memorial in Nova Roma. My parents … well, they don’t condone Imperium, but they kept talkin’ about compromise and how maybe we Aeneans were partly in wrong, till I couldn’t stand it. I went off into wilderness to be by myself—common practice ashore, you probably know—and met tineran Train there. Why not join them for while? It’d be change for me, and I had skills they could use. Last night, as my friend told, senseless brawl happened. I think, now, it was helped along by tinerans I’d thought were my … friends, so they could keep money and valuable rif—article I’d left with them.”
“As a matter of fact,” Erannath said, “he is technically guilty of assault upon a Boseville man. He did no harm, though. He merely suffered it. I doubt that any complaint has been filed. These incidents are frequent at those affairs, and everyone knows it.” He paused. “They do not know why this is. I do.”
Startled from his apathy, Ivar regarded the Ythrian almost as sharply as Riho Mea did. He met their gazes in turn—theirs were the eyes which dropped—and let time go by before he said with no particular inflection: “Perhaps I should keep my discovery for the Intelligence service of the Domain. However, it is of marginal use to us, whereas Aeneans will find it a claw struck into their backs.”
The captain chewed her cigar before she answered: “You mean you will tell me if I let you stay aboard.” Erannath didn’t bother to speak his response. “How do I know—” She caught herself. “Please to pardon this person. I wonder what evidence you have for whatever you will say.”
“None,” he admitted. “Once given the clue, you humans can confirm the statement.”
“Say on.”
“If I do, you will convey us, and ask no further questions?”
“I will judge you by your story.”
Erannath studied her. At length he said: “Very well, for I hear your deathpride.” He was still during a heartbeat. “The breath of tineran life is that creature they call the luck, keeping at least one in every wagon. We call it the slinker.”
“Hoy,” broke from Ivar, “how would you know—?”
“Ythrians have found the three-eyed beasts on a number of planets.” Erannath did not keep the wish to kill out of his voice; and his feathers began to stand erect. “Not on our home. God did not lay that particular snare for us. But on several worlds like it, which naturally we investigated more thoroughly than your race normally does—the lesser terrestroid globes. Always slinkers are associated with fragments of an earlier civilization, such as Aeneas has. We suspect they were spread by that civilization, whether deliberately, accidentally, or through their own design. Some of us theorize that they caused its downfall.”
“Wait a minute,” Ivar protested. “Why have we humans never heard of them?”
“You have, on this world,” Erannath replied. “Probably elsewhere too, but quite incidentally, notes buried in your data banks, because you are more interested in larger and moister planets. And for our part, we have had no special reason to tell you. We learned what slinkers are early in our starfaring, when first we had scant contact with Terrans, afterward hostile contact. We developed means to eradicate them. They long ago ceased to be a problem in the Domain, and no doubt few Ythrians, even, have heard of them nowadays.”
Too much information, too big a universe, passed through Ivar.
“Besides,” Erannath went on, “it seems humans are more susceptible than Ythrians. Our two brain-types are rather differently organized, and the slinkers’ resonate better with yours.”
“Resonate?” Captain Riho scowled.
“The slinker nervous system is an extraordinarily well-developed telepathic transceiver,” Erannath said. “Not of thoughts. We really don’t know what level of reasoning ability the little abominations possess. Nor do we care, in the way that human scientists might. When we had established what they do, our overwhelming desire was merely to slay them.”
“What do they do, then?” Ivar asked around a lump of nausea.
“They violate the innermost self. In effect, they receive emotions and feed these back; they act as amplifiers.” It was terrifying to see Erannath where he crouched. His dry phrases ripped forth. “Perhaps those intelligences you call the Builders developed them as pets, pleasure sources. The Builders may have had cooler spirits than you or we do. Or perhaps they degenerated from the effects, and died.
“I said that the resonance with us Ythrians is weak. Nonetheless we found explorers and colonists showing ugly behavior. It would start as bad dreams, go on to murderously short temper, to year-around ovulation, to—Enough. We tracked down the cause and destroyed it.
“You humans are more vulnerable, it appears. You are lucky that slinkers prefer the deserts. Otherwise all Aeneans might be addicted.
“Yes, addiction. They don’t realize it themselves, they think they keep these pets merely because of custom, but the tinerans are a nation of addicts. Every emotion they begin to feel is fed back into them, amplified, radiated, reamplified, to the limit of what the organism can generate. Do you marvel that they act like constitutional psychopaths? That they touch no drugs in their caravans, but require drugs when away, and cannot survive being away very long?