“Him?” Incredulity faded to curiosity on Albe’s face. “Why not? Go ahead and ask him.”
“Hey, Jary!” Corouda watched the sunburned face lift, startled, to look at him. “Want to play some squamish?” He could barely see the expression on Jary’s face, barely see it change. He thought it became fear, decided he must be wrong. But then Jary squinted at him, shielding his eyes against the sun, and the dark head bobbed. Jary came toward them, watching the ground, with the unsure, shuffling gait of a man who couldn’t find his footing.
He sat down between them awkwardly, an expressionless smile frozen on his mouth, and pulled his feet into position.
Corouda found himself at a loss for words, wondering why in hell he’d done this. He held out the cup, shook it. “Uh - you know how to play squamish?”
Jary took the cup and shook his head. “I don’t g - get much chance to play anything, W - warden.” The smile turned rueful, but there was nothing in his voice. “I don’t get asked.”
Corouda remembered again that Piper Alvarian Jary stuttered, and felt an undesired twinge of sympathy. But hadn’t he heard, from somebody, that Jary had always stuttered? Jary had finally loosened the neck of his coveralls; Corouda could see the beginning of a scar between his collarbones, running down his chest. Jary caught him staring; a hand rose instinctively to close the seal.
Corouda cleared his throat. “Nothing to it, it’s mostly luck. You throw the pieces, and it depends on the - “
Another mindless squall came from the tent behind them. Jary glanced toward it.
” - the distribution, the way the pieces cluster…. Does that bother you?” The bald question was out before he realized it, and left him feeling like a rude child.
Jary looked back at him as though it hadn’t surprised him at all. “No. They’re just animals. B - better them than me.”
Corouda felt his anger rise, remembering what Jary was … until he remembered that he had said the same thing.
“Piper! Come here, I need you.”
Corouda recognized Hoban Orr’s voice. Jary recognized it too, climbed to his feet, stumbling with haste. “I’m sorry, the Doctor wants me.” He backed away; they watched him turn and shuffle off toward Orr’s tent. His voice had not changed. Corouda suddenly tried not to wonder why he was needed…. Catspaw: person used by another to do something dangerous or unpleasant.
Corouda stood up, brushing at his pants. Jary spent his time outside while Orr was dissecting; Piper Alvarian Jary, who had served a man who made Attila the Hun, Hitler, and Kahless look like nice guys. Corouda wondered if it were possible that he really didn’t like to watch.
Albe stood with him and stretched. “What did you think of that? That’s the real Piper Alvarian Jary, all right. ‘Better them than me … just a bunch of animals.’ He probably thinks we’re all a bunch of animals.”
Corouda watched Jary disappear into the tent. “Wouldn’t surprise me at all.”
Piper Alvarian Jary picked his way cautiously over the rough, slagged surface of the narrow cave ledge, setting down one foot and then the other like a puppeteer. Below him, some five meters down the solid rock surface here, lay the shallow liquid surface of the radioactive mud. He rarely looked down at it, too concerned with lighting a path for his own feet. Their geological tests had shown that a seven-meter layer forty meters down in the boiling mud held a freakish concentration of fissile ores, hot enough once to have eaten out this strange, contorted subterranean world. He risked a glance out into the pitch blackness, his headlamp spotlighting grotesque formations cast from molten rock; silvery metallic stalactites and stalagmites, reborn from vaporized ores. Over millennia the water-saturated mass of mud and uranium had become exothermic and then cooled, sporadically, in one spot and then another. Like some immense witches’ caldron, the whole underground had simmered and sputtered for nearly half a million years.
Fumes rising in Jary’s line of sight shrouded his vision of the tormented underworld; he wondered vaguely whether the smell would be unpleasant, if he could remove the helmet of his radiation suit. Someone else might have thought of Hell, but that image did not occur to him.
He stumbled, coming up hard against a jagged outcropping. Orr’s suited form turned back to look at him, glittered in the dancing light of his own headlamp. “Watch out for that case!”
He felt for the bulky container slung against his hip, reassuring his nerveless body that its contents were still secure. Huddled inside it, creeping over one another aimlessly, were the half dozen sluggish, rat-sized troglodytes they had captured this trip. He turned his light on them, but they did not respond, gazing stupidly at him and through him from the observation window. “It’s all right, D - doctor.”
Orr nodded, starting on. Jary ducked a gleaming stalactite, moved forward quickly before the safety line between them jerked taut. He was grateful for the line, even though he had heard the warden named Hyacin-Soong call it his leash. Hyacin-Soong followed behind him now with the other warden, Corouda, who had asked him to play squamish this morning. He didn’t expect them to ask him again; he knew that he had antagonized Hyacin-Soong somehow - maybe just by existing. Corouda still treated him with benign indifference.
Jary glanced again at the trogs, wishing suddenly that Orr would give up on them and take him home. He wanted the safety of the Simeu Institute, the security of the known. He was afraid of his clumsiness in these alien surroundings, afraid of the strangers, afraid of displeasing Orr…. He let the air out of his constricted lungs in a long sigh. Of course he was afraid; he had good reason to be. He was Piper Alvarian Jary.
But Orr would never give up on the trogs, until he either broke the secret code of their alien genes or ran out of specimens to work with. Orr wanted above all to discover how they had adapted to the cave in the geologically short span of time the reactor had been stable - everyone in the expedition wanted to know that. But even the trogs’ basic biology confounded him: what the functions were of the four variant kinds he had observed; how they reproduced when they appeared to be sexless, at least by human standards; what ecological niches they filled, with such hopelessly rudimentary brains. And particularly, how their existence was thermodynamically possible. Orr believed that they seined nutrients directly from the radioactive mud, but even he couldn’t accept the possibility that their food chain ended in nuclear fission. The trogs themselves were faintly radioactive; they were carbon-based, could withstand high pressures, and perceived stimuli far into the short end of the EM spectrum. And that was all that Orr was certain of, so far.
Jary clung with his gloved hands to the rough wall above the ledge as it narrowed, and remembered touching the trogs. Once, when he was alone, he had taken off his protective gloves and held one of them in his bare hands. Its scaled, purplish-gray body had not been cold and slippery as he had imagined, but warm, sinuous, and comforting. He had held onto it for as long as he dared, craving the sensual, sensory pleasure of its motion and the alien texture of its skin. He had caressed its small unresponsive body, while it repeated over and over the same groping motions unperturbed, like an untended machine. And his hands had trembled with the same confusion of shame and desire that he always knew when he handled the experimental animals….
There had been a time when he had played innocently with the soft, supple, pink-eyed mice and rabbits, the quick, curious monkeys, and the iridescent fletters. But then Orr had begun training him as an assistant; and observation of the progress of induced diseases, the clearing away of entrails and blood, the disposal of small, ruined bodies in the incinerator chute had taught him their place, and his own. Animals had no rights and no feelings. But when he held the head of a squirming mouse between his fingers and looked down into the red, amorphous eyes, when he caught its tail for the jerk that would snap its spine, his hands trembled….