Carmen smiled with nasty relish. “You know, we picked up on you by the stream when you first saw this orboni. What did you think you saw there?”
Mark straightened up. “I saw a reasoning creature taking the first steps toward tool using.”
“And this attitude? An attitude of worship?”
Mark nodded, less sure. He glanced around at the man and noticed for the first time that he was clothed in the workmanlike gear of an agent from Earth Central. He was not sure if the man’s expression was one of sympathy or contempt. He turned back to Carmen and saw she now held a small surgical shear.
“I suppose you saw that this orboni’s God was the thrake — a monster. I wonder what it saw?” She stooped to the orboni and sliced off the top of its skull. A writhing ball of flatworms spilled out. “In the end it saw nothing at all. It was blind.” She prodded at the worms with the toe of her boot. “You know what I saw at the stream? I saw an animal with a brain so badly damaged it had lost the use of its normal instinctive abilities. When it fell to its knees, it did so, not to worship, but because its inner ear was full of parasites and it kept losing its sense of balance. Look at them. Look at them, Mark Christian.” Mark stared at the writhing mass of worms as they broke apart and began to die on the bluish dirt. Carmen continued, relentlessly. “Tell me, did your God that made the lion and the lamb make the worms that eat them from the inside out?”
“I have faith.”
At that point the monitor stepped between them and stared down with clinical detachment at the opened skull of the orboni.
“I presume,” he said, “that the thrake has its place in this parasite’s life cycle.” Carmen looked to him. “Yes, the thrake shits their eggs. The parasite goes from there to the water and into the nautiloids. The Orbonnai ingest them and become so riddled they’re easy prey.” As she finished the anger drained out of her.
“Are the thrakai damaged in any way by these parasites?” asked the monitor. Carmen shook her head. “It’s difficult to tell. The life-cycle is so interlinked that you cannot make—” They are ignoring me.
“—an easy assessment based on—”
Suddenly angry, Mark interrupted. “Do you think you’ve won? Do you think that somehow you have proven to me that the Orbonnai are not pre-ascension! I will return to Carth and report my findings. Those skulls… On the basis of them, a mission will be sent here for the…” He trailed off when he noticed they were not listening to him. They were looking past him into the scrub. He turned and saw the thrake he had shot at, standing no more than ten yards away.
“My God! Shoot it! Drive it away!”
He turned and saw the monitor and Carmen looking at each other.
Carmen said, “We can’t have that… a mission here.”
The monitor nodded. “It won’t happen.” He turned to Mark. “You will not be returning to Carth. You will be coming with me to Earth Central to answer to the charge of attempted unlawful killing.”
“What?… Who?”
The monitor pointed at the thrake. “You attempted to kill a grade three sentience. That is a serious offence.”
Carmen said, “The Thrakai were the ones you should have been studying for your spurious proofs. They’re the ones that build those mounds of skulls. Perhaps they worship the Orbonnai. Members of the prehistoric societies of Earth used to worship the animals they ate.” They turned from him then to watch the thrake. It started to move in, slowly, like an animal stalking its prey. Mark could see it had its many joined arms opened out ready to grab any of them that tried to escape. He started to back away, but the monitor’s hand came down on his shoulder with the finality of a guillotine.
“There’s no need for panic,” the monitor said to him, then to Carmen, “What should we do now?”
“Back away slowly, towards the raft. It only wants the orboni. They’ve tried human flesh before, and found it distasteful.”
Mark wanted to shout out how wrong she was as they moved away from the body of Paul. He wanted to run, but the hand on his shoulder seemed to suck the will out of him. It was all he could do to keep his legs moving. Soon, the three of them were backed up against the raft and the thrake had reached the corpse. Mark watched in horror as it severed Paul’s head, then continued to advance on them, with the head held in its lower appendages.
“My God… do something!”
Suddenly Carmen was walking forwards, her arms spread wide, like the thrake’s. Soon she was standing before it, below it. It paused over her like a wall of scrap-iron about to fall, then slowly it stooped, placed the head at her feet, then turned and moved away. In a moment it had picked up the rest of the corpse and was loping for the horizon. Carmen stooped down and picked up the head.
“Souvenir?” she asked Mark.
He stared at her, feeling sick. She tossed the head back on the ground.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, tiredly.
The monitor’s hand did not leave Mark’s shoulder as they boarded the raft.
ABOUT “PROCTORS”
Recently, Lavie Tidhar, a reviewer on Dusksite, managed to obtain a copy of The Engineer (Tanjen), and at the launch party for Tor UK said to me he really liked the ‘Owner’ stories and felt them to contain material for plenty of books. He is absolutely right, and if I can just drag over a few more versions of myself from parallel universes I can get on and write that stuff, and rewrite the four fantasy books and the contemporary novel, produce large collections of Mason’s Rats stories, write the next Heliothane/Umbrathane book, produce many more short stories, start pushing the TV scripts, and write more of them… Of course, what I really need is the capability of a ten-thousand-year-old immortal with godlike powers and vast intelligence and wisdom. I wouldn’t mind the spaceship too.
PROCTORS
Mr Coti pulled his rain cape closer about his shoulders and looked nervously out from under his barley-bowl hat. Cloud occluded the light of the moons. The rain was coming down in sheets and, having turned the street into a quagmire, was now turning it into a stream. This was good for Coti’s work, since as a board-cutter in the wilderness, he was much in demand at this time of the year, but the cutting of boards was the last thing on his mind at that moment. It was imperative he got to Chief Scientist Lumi before they found him. This was his only insurance of survivaclass="underline" once he had imparted his news, Cromwell would leave him alone. Cromwell would not dare to go up against C S Lumi. Coti halted at the corner of Blue Street, the boards creaky and slippery underneath him, and for a moment thought he might be able to reach his destination without mishap — Lumi’s house was only a street away — then he saw the caped figures lurking in a side alley and darted back for cover. Few options now remained to him. He could either make a run for Lumi’s house while making as much noise as possible and attracting all the attention he could, but the probable result of this would be a dart in the back, or he could sneak there, using what cover he could, but he reckoned every access would be covered. He decided his best option was neither of these. He would hide until morning and try to get to Lumi when he came out. Cromwell’s people always preferred the cover of darkness for their nefarious doings. Hugging a wall Coti stepped off the boardwalk and crept back down the alley he had been about to leave. Back that way he had spotted a suitable woodpile he could hide in, but before he reached it, a girl stepped out of a shadowed doorway.
The girl was young and innocent looking and Coti thought she might just live here and have nothing to do with Cromwell. When she grinned and said, “Mr Coti,” he knew otherwise. Two bulky figures followed her out of the doorway and stepped past her to grab him. Coti pulled his board cutter and switched it on. It hummed in the rain, inset lights flickering from red to green and back again. He swung it at his nearest assailant, who screamed and fell back as a board-thick slice of flesh and bone peeled from his shoulder. The second man dropkicked Coti in the chest. The cutter flew from his grip and landed sizzling in the mud. In a moment, the man had Coti on his knees with his arm wrenched up around his back. The girl stepped forward, pulling something from under her rain cape while the first man staggered to the wall to lean against it moaning while he clutched his half-severed arm.