Shon'jir

Chapter One

THE MRI was still sedated. They kept him that way con­stantly, dazed and bewildered at this place that echoed of hu­man voices and strange machinery.

Sten Duncan came to stand at the mri's bedside as he did twice each day, under the eye of the security officer who stood just outside the windowed partition. He came to see Niun, permitted to do so because he was the only one of all at Kesrith base that knew him. Today there was a hazy awareness in the golden, large-irised eyes. Duncan fancied the look there to be one of reproach.

Niun had lost weight. His golden skin was marked in many places with healing wounds, stark and angry. He had fought and won a battle for life which, fully conscious, he would surely have refused to win; but Niun remained ignorant of the humans who came and went about him, the scientists who, in concert with his physicians, robbed him of dignity.

They were enemies of mankind, the mri. Forty years of war, of ruined worlds and dead numbered by the millions and yet most humans had never seen the enemy. Fewer still had looked upon a mri's living and unveiled face.

They were a beautiful people, tall and slim and golden beneath their black robes: golden manes streaked with bronze, delicate, humanoid features, long, slender hands; their ears had a little tuft of pale down at the tips, and their eyes were brilliant amber, with a nictitating membrane that pro­tected them from dust and glare. The mri were at once hu­manlike and disturbingly alien. Such also were their minds, that could grasp outsiders' ways and yet steadfastly refused to compromise with them.

In the next room, similarly treated, lay Melein, called she'pan, leader of the mri: a young woman and while Niun was angular and gaunt, a warrior of his kind, Melein was del­icate and fine. On their faces both mri were scarred, three fine lines of blue stain slanting across each cheek, from the inner corner of the eye to the outer edge of the cheekbone, marks of meaning no human knew. On Melein's sleeping face, the fine blue lines lent exotic beauty to her bronze-lashed eyes; she seemed too fragile to partake of mri ferocity, or to bear the weight of mri crimes. Those that handled the mri treated her gently, even hushed their voices when they were in the room with her, touched her as little as possible, and that carefully. She seemed less a captive enemy than a lovely, sad child.

It was Niun they chose for their investigations Niun, un­questionably the enemy, who had exacted a heavy price for his taking. He had been stronger from the beginning, his wounds more easily treated; and for all that, it was not offi­cially expected that Niun survive. They called their exam­inations medical treatments, and entered them so in the records, but in the name of those treatments, Niun had been holographed, scanned inside and out, had yielded tissue samples and sera whatever the investigators desired and more than once Duncan had seen him handled with unfeeling roughness, or left on the table too near waking while humans delayed about their business with him.

Duncan closed his eyes to it, fearing that any protest he made would see him barred from the mri's vicinity entirely. The mri had been kept alive, despite their extensive injuries; they survived; they healed; and Duncan found that of the greatest concern. The mri's personal ethic rejected outsiders, abhorred medicine, refused the pity of their enemy; but in nothing had these two mri been given a choice. They be­longed to the scientists that had found the means to prolong their lives. They were not allowed to wake and that too was for the purpose of keeping them alive.

"Niun," Duncan said softly, for the guard outside was mo­mentarily staring elsewhere. He touched the back of Niun's long-fingered hand, below the webbing of the restraint; they kept the mri carefully restrained at all times, for Niun would tear at the wound if he once found the chance: so it was feared. Other captive mri had done so, killing themselves. None had ever been kept alive.

"Niun," he said again, persistent in what had become a twice-daily ritual to let the mri know, if nothing more, that someone remained who could speak his name; to make the mri think, in whatever far place his consciousness wandered; to make some contact with the mri's numbed mind.

Niun's eyes briefly seemed to track and gave it up again, hazing as the membrane went over them.

"It's Duncan," he persisted, and closed his hand forcefully on the mri's. "Niun, it's Duncan.”

The membrane retreated; the eyes cleared; the slim fingers jerked, almost closed. Niun stared at him, and Duncan's heart leaped in hope, for it was the first indication the mri had made that he was aware, proof that the mind, the man he knew, was undamaged. Duncan saw the mri's eyes wander through the room, linger at the door, where the guard was visible.

"You are still on Kesrith," Duncan said softly, lest the guard hear and notice them. "You're aboard probe ship Flower, just outside the city. Pay no attention to the man. That is nothing, Niun. It's all right.”

Possibly Niun understood; but the amber eyes hazed and closed, and he slipped back into the grip of the drugs, free of pain, free of understanding, free of remembering.

They were the last of their kind, Niun and Melein the last mri, not alone on Kesrith, but anywhere. It was the rea­son that the scientists would not let them go: it was a chance at the mri enigma that might never, after them, be repeated. The mri had died here on Kesrith, in one night of fire and treachery all, all save these two, who survived as a sad curi­osity in the hands of then enemies.

And they had been put there by Duncan, whom they had trusted.

Duncan pressed Niun's unfeeling shoulder and turned away, paused to look through the dark glass partition into the room where Melein lay sleeping. He no longer visited her, not since she had grown stronger. Among mri she would have been holy, untouchable: an outsider did not speak to her directly, but through others. Whatever she endured of loneliness and terror among her enemies was not worse than humiliation. Her enemies she might hate and ignore, slipping into unconsciousness and forgetting; but before him, whose name she knew, who had known her when she was free, she might feel deep shame.

She rested peacefully. Duncan watched the gentle rise and fall of her breathing for a moment, assuring himself that she was well and comfortable, then turned away and opened the door, murmured absent-minded thanks to the guard, who let him out of the restricted section and into the outer corridor.

Duncan ascended to the main level of the crowded probe ship, dodging white-uniformed science techs and blue-uni­formed staff, a man out of place in Flower. His own khaki brown was the uniform of the SurTac, Surface Tactical Force. Like the scientific personnel of Flower, he was an ex­pert; his skills, however, were no longer needed on Kesrith or elsewhere. The war was over.

He had become like the mri, obsolete.

He checked out of Flower, a clerical formality. Security knew him well enough, as all humans on Kesrith knew him the human who had lived among mri. He walked out onto the ramp and down, onto the mesh causeway humans flung across the powdery earth of Kesrith.

Nothing grew on the white plain outside, as far as the eye could see. Life was everywhere scant on Kesrith, with its alkali flats, its dead ranges, its few and shallow seas. The world was lit by a red sun named Arain, and by two moons. It was one of six planets in the system, the only one even marginally habitable. The air was thin, cold in shadow and burning hot in the direct rays of Arain; and rains that passed through it left the skin burning and dry. Powdery, caustic dust crept into everything, even the tightest seals, making men miserable and eventually destroying machinery. In most places Kesrith was uninhabitable by humans, save here in the lowland basin about Kesrith's sole city, on the shore of a poi­sonous sea: one small area where moisture was plentiful, amid geysers and steaming pools, and crusted earth that would not bear a man's weight.

No men were indigenous to Kesrith. The world had first belonged to the dusei, great brown quadrupeds, vaguely ur­sine in appearance, velvet-skinned and slow-moving, mas­sively clawed. Then had come the mri, whose towers had once stood over toward the high hills, where now only a heap of stone remained, a tomb for those that had died within.

And then had come the regul, hungry for minerals and wealth and territory, who had hired the mri to fight against humankind. It was the regul city that humanity had inherited, humans the latest heirs to Kesrith: a squat agglomerate of ugly build­ings, the tallest only two stories, and those stories lower than human standard. The city was laid out in a rectangle: the Nom, the sole two-storied building, was outermost, with other buildings arranged in the outline of the square before it. All streets followed that bow about the Nom square narrow streets that were designed for regul transport, not human ve­hicles, streets crossed by the fingers of white sand that in­truded everywhere on Kesrith, constantly seeking entry. At the left of the city was the Alkaline Sea, that received the runoff of Kesrith's mineral flats. Volcanic fires smouldered and bubbled under the surface of that sea as they did below that of the whole valley, that had once been a delicate land of thin crusts and mineral spires a land pitted and ruined now by scars of combat.

There was a water-recovery plant, its towers extending out into the sea. Repairs were underway there, trying to release the city from its severe rationing. There had been a spaceport too, on the opposite side of the city, but that was now in complete ruin, an area of scorched earth and a remnant of twisted metal that had once been a regul and a mri ship.

Of ships onworld now, there was only Flower, an out-worlds probe designed for portless landings, squatting on a knoll of hard rock that rose on the water-plant road. Beside her, an airfield had been improvised by mesh and by fill and hardening of the unstable surface work that would quickly yield to the caustic rains. Nothing was lasting on Kesrith. En­dure it might, so long as it received constant attention and re­pair; but the weather and the dust would take it in the end. The whole surface of Kesrith seemed to melt and flow under the torrential rains, the whole storm pattern of the continent channeled by mountain barriers toward this basin, making it live, but making life within it difficult.

It was an environment in which only the dusei and the mri had ever thrived without the protections of artificial environ­ments; and the mri had done so by reliance on the dusei.

To such an inheritance had humanity come, intruders lately at war with the mri and now at war with their world, almost scoured off its face by storms, harassed by the wild dusei, befriended only by the regul, who had killed off the mri for them, an act of genocide to please their human con­querors.

Duncan traversed the causeway at his own slow pace, savoring the acrid air. His bare face and hands were painfully assaulted by Arain's fierce radiation even in this compara­tively short walk. It was noon. Little stirred in the wild dur­ing the hours of Arain's zenith; but humans, safe within their filtered and air-conditioned environments, ignored the sun. Human authority imposed a human schedule on Kesrith's day, segmenting it into slightly lengthened seconds, minutes, hours, for the convenience of those who dwelled in the city, where daylight was visible and meaningful, but those were few. Universal Standard was still the yardstick for the scien­tific community of Flower, and for the warship that orbited overhead.

Duncan walked with eyes open to the land, saw the camouflaged body of a leathery jo, one of the flying creatures of Kesrith, poised to last out the heat in the shadow of a large rock saw also the trail of a sandsnake that had lately crossed the ground beside the causeway, seeking the nether side of some rock to protect itself from the sun and from predators. The jo waited, patiently, for its appointed prey. Such things Niun had taught Duncan to see.

Across the mineral flats, in the wreckage wrought by the fighting, a geyser plumed, a common sight. The world was re­pairing its damage, patiently setting about more aeons of building; but hereafter would come humans in greater and greater numbers, to search out a way to undo it and make Kesrith their own.

The mesh gave way to concrete at the city's edge, a border partially overcome by drifting sand. Duncan walked onto solid ground, past the observation deck of the Nom, where a surveillance system had been mounted to watch the causeway, and up to the rear door that had become main entry for hu­man personnel, leading as it did toward Flower and the air­field and shuttle landing.

The door hissed open and shut. Nom air came as a shock, scented as it was with its own filtered human-regul taint, hu­midified and sweeter than the air outside, that sunlight-over-cold heat that burned and chilled at once. Here were gardens, kept marginally watered during rationing, botanical speci­mens from regul worlds, and therefore important: a liver-spotted white vine that had shed its lavender blooms under stress; a sad-looking tree with sparse silver leaves; a hardy gray-green moss. And the regul-built halls high in the cen­ter, at least by regul standards gave a tall human a feeling of confinement. The corridors were rounded and recessed along one side, where gleaming rails afforded regul sleds a faster, hazard-free movement along the side without doors. As Duncan turned for the ramp, one whisked past almost too fast to distinguish, whipped round the corner and was gone. At that pace it would be a supply sled, carrying cargo but no personnel.

Regul tended much to automation. They moved slowly, ponderously, their short legs incapable of bearing their own weight for any distance. The regul who did move about afoot were younglings, sexless and still mobile, not yet having ac­quired their adult bulk. The elders, the muscles of their legs atrophied, hardly stirred at all, save in the prosthetic comfort of their sleds.

And, alien in the corridors of the Nom, humans moved, tall, stalking shapes strangely rapid among the squat, slow forms of regul.

Duncan's own quarters were on the second level, a private room. It was luxury in one sense: solitude was a comfort he had not had in a very long time, for he had come to Kesrith as attendant to the governor; but he was keenly aware what the small, single room represented, a fall from intimacy with the important powers of Kesrith, specifically with Stavros, the Honorable George Stavros, governor of the new territories of human conquest. Duncan had found himself quietly preempted from his post by a military medical aide, one Evans, E.; he had come back from Kesrith's backlands and from sickbay to find that state of affairs, and although he had hoped, he had received no invitation to move back into his old quarters in the anteroom of Stavros' apartments that post of regul protocol which, among their conquered hosts, humans yet observed meticulously in public. An elder of Stavros' high rank must have at least one youngling to attend his needs and fend off unwelcome visitors; and that duty now belonged to Evans. Duncan was kept at a distance; his con­tact with Stavros, once close, was suddenly formal: an occa­sional greeting as they passed in the hall, that was the limit of it. Even the debriefing after his mission had been handled by others and passed second-hand to Stavros, through the scien­tists, the medics and the military.

Duncan understood his disfavor now as permanent. It was Stavros' concession to the regul, who hated him and feared his influence. And what his position on Kesrith would be hereafter, he did not know.

It was, for his personal hopes, the end. He might have pro­moted himself to a colonial staff position by cultivating Stavros' favor. He was still due considerable pay for his five year enlistment in the hazardous stage of the Kesrithi mis­sion pay and transport to the world of his choice, or settle­ment on Kesrith itself, subject to the approval of the governor. He had been lured by such hopes once and briefly, half-believing them. He had taken the post because it was an offer, in an area and at a time when offers were scarce; and because he was nearing his statistical limit of survival on mis­sions of greater hazard. It had seemed then a way to survive, marginally at least, as he had always survived.

He had survived again, had come back from Stavros' serv­ice scarred and sunburned and mentally shaken after a trek through the Kesrithi backlands which the lately arrived regu­lars would never have survived. He had learned Kesrith as no human would after him; and he had been among mri, and had come back alive, which no human had done before him.

And in his distress he had told Stavros the truth of what he had learned, directly and trustingly.

That had been his great mistake.

He passed the door that belonged to Stavros and Evans, and opened his own apartment, Spartan in its appointments and lacking the small anteroom that was essential to status in the Nom, among regul. He touched the switch to close the door, and at the same panel opened the storm shields. The windows afforded a view of the way that he had come, of Flower on her knoll, a squat half-ovoid on stilts; of a sky that, at least today, was cloudless, a rusty pink. There had not been a storm in days. Nature, like the various inhabitants of Kesrith, seemed to have spent its violence: there was an exhausted hush over the world.

Duncan stripped and sponged off with chemical condi­tioner, a practice that the caustic dust of Kesrith made advis­able, that his physician still insisted upon, and changed into his lighter uniform. He was bound for the library, that build­ing across the square from the Nom, accessible by a base­ment hallway: it was part of the regul university complex, which humans now held.

He spent his afternoons and evenings there; and anyone who had known Sten Duncan back in humanity's home terri­tory would have found that incredible. He was not a scholar. He had been well-trained in his profession: he knew the mechanics of ships and of weapons, knew a bit of geology and ecology, and the working of computers all in areas necessary for efficiency in combat, in which he had been trained from a war-time youth, parentless, single-minded in the direction of his life. All his knowledge was practical, gathered at need, rammed into his head by instructors solely interested in his survival to kill the enemy.

That was before he had seen his war ended before he had seen his enemy murdered by regul; or shared a camp with the survivors; or seen the proud mri on human charity.

Two thousand years of records and charts and tapes lay in the regul library, truths concealed in regul language and regul obscurities. Duncan studied. He searched out what the mri had been on Kesrith, what they had been elsewhere, with an interest infinitely more personal than that of Flower's scien­tists.

Stavros disapproved. It flaunted attitudes and interests that regul feared and distrusted; and offending the regul ran counter to humanity's new policies. It embarrassed Stavros; it angered him, who had vast authority on Kesrith and in its new territories.

But the library still remained Duncan's choice on his hours of liberty, which were extensive in his useless existence. He had begun by making himself a nuisance among Flower's personnel, who themselves were mining the library for what could be gained, duplicating tapes and records wholesale for later study back in the labs of Elag/Haven and Zoroaster. Duncan searched out those particular records that had to do with mri, and made himself helpful to certain of the Flower personnel who could be persuaded to share his interest. With his own stumbling command of the regul tongue, he could do little himself toward solving the tapes or interpreting the charts; but he talked with the scientists who could. He rea­soned with them; he tried to make them understand, with all his insistence, that which he did not understand himself.

To learn what it was he had spent his life destroying, what he had seen utterly obliterated.

He gathered up his notes and his handmade dictionary and prepared to leave the room. The light on the panel flashed.

"Kose Sten Duncan," a regul voice said, still giving him his old title as Stavros' assistant, which surprised him. "Kose Sten Duncan.”

He pressed the button for reply, vaguely uneasy that any­one in the Nom chose to intervene with him, disturbing his obscurity. His earnest ambition now was simple: to be let alone, to take those assignments that might be given him through lower channels, and to be forgotten by the higher ones.

"I am here," he told the regul.

"The reverence bai Stavros sends you his order that you join him in his offices immediately.”

Duncan hesitated, heart clenched at the foreknowledge that his period of grace was over. Somewhere in the labyrinth of Flower papers must have been signed, declaring him fit for service; somewhere hi the Nom papers were being prepared that would similarly mark him down in someone's employ. Nothing on colonial Kesrith could remain without some des­ignated use.

'Tell the reverence," he said, "that I am coming now.”

The regul returned some curt syllable, ending the commu­nication; it lacked respect. Duncan flung his notes onto the table, opened the door and strode out into the corridor.

It was no accident that Stavros had summoned him at this hour. Duncan had become precise in his habits: from his treatment before noon, to his apartment at noon, and from his apartment to the library by a quarter til.

And concerning the library, he had received his warning.

He began, feverish in his anxiety, to anticipate the worst things that might await him: a reprimand, a direct order to abandon his visits to the library or barring him from Flower, and from the mri. He had already defied Stavros' hinted displeasure; and did he receive and refuse a direct or­der he would find himself transferred permanently station-ward, to Saber, Kesrith's military guard.

Where you belong, he could imagine Stavros saying. Leave the mri to the scientists.

He stalked through the corridor that wound down the ramp, shouldering aside a slow-moving regul youngling at the turn and not apologizing. Nor would the regul apologize to him, a human it needed not fear. A hiss of anger followed him, and other younglings paused to glare at him.

Stavros' offices, again a matter of status within a regul community, were on the ground floor of the stairless Nom, beyond broad doors that afforded easy access to the regul sleds.

The office doors were open. The secretary at Stavros' re­ception office was human, another of Saber's personnel, a ComTech whose specialized linguistic skills were wasted at this post; but at least Stavros considered security, and did not install a regul youngling at this most sensitive post, where too much might be overheard and, by a regul, memorized ver­batim at the hearing. The tech stirred from his boredom, recognized Duncan with an expression of sudden reserve. A SurTac, Duncan was outside the regular military, but he was due a ComTech's respect.

"The governor says go on in," the tech said; and with a flicker of a glance to the closed inner door and back again: "The bai is in there, sir.”

Hulagh.

Elder of the regul on Kesrith,

"Thank you," Duncan said, jaw set.

"Sir," the ComTech said. "With apologies: the governor advises you to walk in softly. His words, sir.”

"Yes," Duncan said, and restrained his temper with a visi­ble effort for the ComTech's benefit. He knew how he was re­puted at Kesrith base for rashness marked with official disfavor. He also knew his way among the diplomats better than any deskbound tech.

It was not the moment for temper. His transfer to Saber would be complete victory for the regul bai. He could throw away every remaining influence he had on the behalf of the mri, with a few ill-chosen words between himself and Stavros or between himself and the bai, and he was resolved to keep them unspoken. The regul would not understand any differ­ence of opinion between elder and youngling; any intimation of dissent would reflect on Stavros, and Stavros would not ig­nore that, not on a personal basis, not on an official one.

The secretary opened the door by remote and Duncan en­tered with a meek and quiet step, with a bow and a proper deference to the two rulers of Kesrith.

"Duncan," said Stavros aloud, and not unkindly. Both hu­man and regul bai were encased in shining metal, alike until the eye rested on the flesh contained in the center of the sled-assembly. Stavros was exceedingly advanced in years, partially paralyzed, his affliction which he had suffered on Kesrith still hindering his speech to such an extent that he used the sled's communication screen to converse with regul, in their difficult language; but to humans he had begun to use speech again. The stricken limbs had regained some strength, but, Stavros still kept to the sled, regul-made, the prestige of a regul elder. Speed, power, instant access to any circuitry in the Nom: Duncan understood the practical considerations in which Stavros refused to give up the machine, but he hated the policy which it represented human accommodation with the regul, human imitation of regul ways.

"Sir," Duncan said quietly, acknowledging the greeting; and he faced bai Hulagh in the next breath, serenely court­eous and trembling inside with anger, smiling as he met the small dark eyes of the regul elder. Great hulking monster in silver-edged gossamer, his flesh fold over fold of fat in which muscle had almost completely atrophied, particularly in the lower limbs: Duncan loathed the sight of him. The regul's face was bony plate, dark as the rest of his hide, and smooth, unlike the rest of his hide. The composite of facial features, their symmetry, gave an illusion of humanity; but taken indi­vidually, no feature was human. The eyes were brown and round, sunk in pits of wrinkled skin. The nose was reduced to slits that could flare or close completely. The lips were inver­ted, a mere tight-pressed slash at the moment, edged in bony plate. Hulagh's nostrils were tightly compressed now, save for quick puffs of expelled air, a signal of displeasure in the meeting as ominous as a human scowl.

Hulagh turned his sled abruptly aside, a pointed rebuff to a presumptuous youngling, and smiled at Stavros, a relaxing of the eyes and nostrils, a slight opening of the mouth. It was uncertain whether such a gesture was native to the regul or an attempt at a human one.

"It is good," said Hulagh in his rumbling Basic, "that the youngling Duncan has recovered.”

"Yes," said Stavros aloud, in the regul tongue. The com screen on the sled angled toward Duncan and flashed to Basic mode, human symbols and alphabet. Be seated. Wait.

Duncan found a chair against the wall and sat down and listened, wondering why he had been called to this confer­ence, why Stavros had chosen to put him on what surely was display for Hulagh's benefit. Duncan's inferior command of the regul language made it impossible for him to pick up much of what the regul bai said, and he could gather nothing at all of what Stavros answered, for though he could see the com screen at this angle, he could read but few words of the intricate written language, which the eidetic regul almost never used themselves.

One hearing of anything, however complex, and the regul never forgot. They needed no notes. Their records were oral, taped, reduced to writing only when deemed of some lasting importance.

Duncan's ears pricked when he heard his own name and the phrase released from duty. He sat still, hands tightening on the edge of the thick regul chair while the two diplomats traded endless pleasantries, until at last Hulagh prepared to take his leave.

The bai's sled faced about. This time Hulagh turned that false smile on him. "Good day, youngling Duncan," he said.

Duncan had the presence of mind to rise and bow, which was the courteous and proper response for a youngling to an elder; and the sled whisked out the opened door as he stood, fists clenched, and looked down at Stavros.

"Sit down," Stavros said.

The door closed. Duncan came and took the chair nearest Stavros' sled. The windows blackened, shutting out the out­side world. They were entirely on room lights.

"My congratulations," Stavros said. "Well played, if obvi­ously insincere.”

"Am I being transferred?" Duncan asked directly, an abruptness that brought a flicker of displeasure to Stavros’ eyes. Duncan regretted it at once further proof, Stavros might read it, that he was unstable. Above all else, he had wished to avoid that impression.

"Patience," Stavros counseled him. Then he spoke to the ComTech outside, gave an order for incoming calls to be fur­ther delayed, and relaxed with a sigh, still watching Duncan intently. "Hulagh," said Stavros, "has been persuaded not to have your head. I told him that your hardship in the desert had unhinged your mind. Hulagh seems to accept that possi­bility as an excuse that will save his pride. He has decided to accept your presence in his sight again; but he doesn't like it.”

"That regul," Duncan said, doggedly reiterating the state­ment that had ruined him, "committed genocide. If he didn't push the button himself, he ordered the one that did. I gave you my statement on what happened out there that night. You know that I'm telling the truth. You know it.”

"Officially," said Stavros, "I don't. Duncan, I will try to reason with you. Matters are not as simple as you would wish. Hulagh himself suffered in that action: he lost his ship, his younglings, his total wealth and his prestige and the prestige of his doch. A regul doch may fall, one important to mankind. Do you comprehend what I'm telling you? Hulagh's doch is the peace party. If it falls, it will be dangerous for all of us, and not only for those of us on Kesrith. We're talking about the peace, do you understand that?”

They were back on old ground. Arguments began from here, leading to known positions. Duncan opened his mouth to speak, persistently to restate what Stavros knew, what he had told his interrogators times beyond counting. Stavros cut him off with an impatient gesture, saving him the effort that he knew already was futile. Duncan found himself tired, ex­hausted of hope and belief in the powers that ruled Kesrith, most of all in this man that he had once served.

"Listen," said Stavros sharply. "Human men died, too at Haven.”

"I was there," Duncan returned, bitter in the memory. He did not add what was also true, that Stavros had not been. Many a SurTac had left his unburied corpse on Elag/Haven, and ten other worlds of that zone, while the diplomats were safe behind the lines.

"Human men died," Stavros continued, intent on making his point, "there and here, at the hands of mri. Humans would have died in-the future will die, if the peace should collapse, if somewhere the regul that want war find political power and more such mercenaries as the mri. Or does that fail to matter in your reckoning?”

"It matters.”

Stavros was silent a time. He moved his sled to reach for a cup of soi abandoned on the edge of a table. He drank, and stared at Duncan over the rim of the cup, set it down again. "I know it matters," he said at last. "Duncan, I regretted hav­ing to replace you.”

It was the first time Stavros had said so. "Yes, sir," Duncan said. "I know it was necessary.”

"There were several reasons," Stavros said. "First, because you offended bai Hulagh to his face, and you know you're lucky to have come off alive from that. Second, you were put into sickbay with an indefinite prognosis, and I need help " He gestured at his own body, encased in metal. "You're no medic. You didn't sign on for this. Evans is useful in that re­gard. Your skills are valuable elsewhere.”

Duncan listened, painfully aware that he was being played, prepared for something. One did not maneuver George Stavros; Stavros maneuvered others. Stavros was a profes­sional at it; and the mind in that fettered shell had very few human dependencies, an aged man who had dealt with crises involving worlds for more years than SurTacs tended to live, who had thrown aside family and a comfortable retirement to seize a governorship on a frontier like Kesrith. For a brief time Duncan had felt there had been some attachment be­tween himself and Stavros; he had given Stavros unstintingly of effort and loyalty had even believed in him enough to of­fer him truth. But to manage others with subtlety, even with ruthlessness, that was the skill for which Stavros had won his appointment; Duncan determined neither to believe him nor to be angry that he had been used and he knew that even so, Stavros had the skill to lie to him again.

"I have excused your actions," Stavros said, "and covered them as far as I can; but you have lost your usefulness to me hi the capacity in which you signed on. Hulagh can be per­suaded to tolerate your presence; but the suspicion that you have moved back into some position of direct influence would be more than he could bear, and it might endanger your life. I don't want that kind of trouble, Duncan, or the complications your murder might create. Regul are simply not prepared to believe the killing of a youngling is of equal seriousness with the killing of an elder.”

"I don't want to be sent offworld.”

"You don't.”

"No, sir. I don't.”

Stavros stared at him. "You have this personal attachment to those two mri. Attachment obsession. You're no longer a rational man on the subject, Duncan. Think. Explain to me. What do you hope to do or to find? What's the point of this sudden scholarship of yours, these hours in the library, in full view of the regul? What are you looking for?”

"I don't know, sir.”

"You don't know. But' it involves every mri record you can find.”

Duncan clenched his jaw, leaned back and made himself draw an even breath. Stavros left the silence, waiting for him. "I want to know," Duncan said finally, "what they were. I saw them die. I saw a whole species die out there. I want to know what it was I saw destroyed.”

"That doesn't make sense.”

"I was there. You weren't." Duncan's mind filled again with the night, the dark, the blinding light of the destruction. A mri body pressed against him, two men equally trembling in the forces that had destroyed a species.

Stavros gazed at him a long time. His face grew sober, even pitying, and this was unaccustomed for Stavros. "What do you think? That it might have been you that drew the at­tack to them? Is that what's eating at you that you might be responsible, as much as Hulagh?”

It hit near enough the mark. Duncan sat still, knowing that he was not going to be able to talk rationally about it Stavros let the silence hang there a moment.

"Perhaps," said Stavros finally, "it would be better if you would go up to Saber for a time, into an environment more familiar to you, where you can sort out your thinking.”

"No, sir. It would not be better. You took me off assign­ment with you. I accept that. But give me something else: I waive my transfer home, and my discharge. Give me another assignment, here on Kesrith.”

"That is a request, I take it.”

"Yes, sir. That is a request.”

"Everything you do, since you were attached to me, is ob­served and taken for omen by the regul. You've persisted in aggravating the situation. You came here to assist, SurTac Duncan, not to formulate policy.”

Duncan did not answer. It was not expected. Stavros' mouth worked in the effort prolonged speech cost him; he drew a difficult breath, and Duncan grew concerned, remem­bering that Stavros was a sick man, that he was trying, amid all other pressures, to remember something of personal debts. He put a curb on his temper.

"You took it on yourself," Stavros said at last, "to accuse bai Hulagh of murder. You created an incident that nearly shipwrecked the whole Kesrithi diplomatic effort. Maybe you think you were justified. Let us suppose " Stavros' harsh, strained voice acquired a marginally gentler tone. "Let us suppose for the sake of argument that you were absolutely justified. But you do not make decisions like that, SurTac Duncan, and you must know that, somewhere at the bottom of your righteousness.”

"Yes, sir," he said very quietly.

"As it happens," said Stavros, "I don't doubt you. And I'm positive the bai tried to kill you in spite of all my efforts to reassure him. When he found you among mri, that was too much for him. I think you know that. I think you're bothered , by that possibility, and I wish that I could set your mind at ease and say that it wasn't so. I can't. Hulagh probably did exactly what you charge he did. But charges like that aren't profitable for me to pursue right now. I recovered you alive. That was the best that I could do, with all else that was going on. I recovered your mri too, quite incidentally.”

"What remains of them. The medics “

"Yes. What remains of them. But you can't undo that. You can't do a thing about it.”

"Yes, sir.”

"The medics tell me you've healed.”

"Yes, sir." Duncan drew a deep breath and decided finally that Stavros was trying to put him at ease. He watched as the governor tried awkwardly to manipulate a clean cup into the dispenser rose and took over that task, filling the cup the governor was going to offer him. Stavros favored him with a one-sided smile.

"Still not what I was," Stavros said ruefully. "The medics don't make extravagant promises, but the exercises are help­ing. Makes the metal beast easier to manage, at least. Here, give my cup a warm-up, will you?”

Duncan did as requested, put it in Stavros' hand, settled again with his own cup cradled in his palms. After a moment he took his first sip, savoring the pleasant warmth. Soi was a mild stimulant. He found himself drinking more of it than was likely good for him these last few days, but his taste for food had been off since his sojourn in the desert. He sipped at the hot liquid and relaxed, knew that he was being swept into Stavros' talented manipulations, set at ease, moved, di­rected; but he was also being heard, for what it was worth. He believed, if nothing else, that Stavros began to listen and cultivated the regul for reasons that did not involve naivete.

"It was a mistake, my speaking out," Duncan admitted, which he had never admitted, not to his several interrogators or in any of the written reports he had filed. "It wasn't that I didn't know what I was saying; I did. But I shouldn't have said it in front of the regul.”

"You were in a state of collapse. I understood that.”

Duncan's mouth twisted. He set the cup aside. "Security got a sedative into me to shut me up and you know it. I did not collapse.”

"You talked about a holy place," Stavros said. "But you never would talk about it in debriefing, not even to direct questions. Was that where you found the artifact you brought back?”

Duncan's eyes went unfocused, his heart speeding. His hands shook. He attempted to disguise the fact by reaching for the plastic cup and clenching it tightly in both hands.

"Duncan?”

Dark and fire, a gleaming metal ovoid cradled in Niun's arms, precious to the mri, more than their lives, who were the last of their kind. Do nothing, Melein had bidden him while he stood in that place holy to the mri, touch nothing, see nothing. He had violated that trust, delivering the wounded mri into human care, to save their lives, by putting that metal ovoid into human hands, itself to be probed by human science. He had spoken in delirium. He looked at Stavros, helpless to shrug it off; he did not know how much he had said, or with what detail. There was the artifact itself, in Flower's labs, to make lies of any denial.

"I had better write the reports over," Duncan said. He did not know what else to say. A colonial governor had dictato­rial powers in that stage before there were parliaments and laws. He himself was not a civ, and unprotected in any in­stance. There was very little that Stavros could not do even including execution, certainly including shipping him to some station elsewhere, away from the mri, away from all hope of access to them and to Kesrith, forever.

"Your account was not accurate, then.”

Duncan cast everything into the balance. "I was shaken. I wasn't sure, after I was silenced the first time, how much was really wanted on record.”

"Don't give me that nonsense.”

"I was not rational at the time. To be honest to be hon­est, sir, I had the feeling that you wanted to bury everything about the mri, everything that happened. I wasn't sure I might not be put off Kesrith because I knew too much. I'm still not sure that it won't happen.”

"You know the seriousness of what you're charging?”

"This is a frontier," Duncan said. "I know that you can do what you want to do. Even to having me shot. I don't know the limit of what I know or how important it is. If an entire species can be wiped off the board and forgotten what am I?”

Stavros frowned, sipped at his drink, made a face and set it aside again. "Duncan, the regul are living; their victims aren't. So we deal with the regul, who are a force still dan­gerous and the mri " He moved the sled, turned it, looked at him at closer range. "You have your opinions on the mri, very obviously. What would you do with them?”

"Turn them loose. They won't live in captivity.”

"That simple? But it's not quite that simple afterwards. What of the regul?”

"The mri won't fight for the regul any longer and there are only two of them. Only two “

"Caring nothing for their lives, even two mri are consider­able; and they have a considerable grudge against bai Hu­lagh who heads the regul peace party, SurTac Duncan.”

"I know these two mri," Duncan said. "They did nothing to anyone on this world except to defend themselves. They only tried to get to safety, and we wouldn't let them. Let them go now, and they'd leave. That's all they want.”

"For now.”

"There is no tomorrow for them," Duncan said, and then Stavros looked at him quizzically. "There will be no more generations. There's a taboo between those two. Besides, even if there weren't ten, even twenty generations wouldn't make a vast threat out of them.”

Stavros frowned, backed the sled, opened the door. "Walk with me," he said, "upstairs. You're going nowhere else, I trust.”

"Yes, sir," Duncan agreed. Stavros undoubtedly meant to put him off his balance, and he had done so. He was asked to accompany Stavros in public, before regul. It was a demon­stration of something, a restoration of confidence: he was not sure what. Perhaps he was being bribed, in subtle fashion, of­fered status and the alternative was transfer to Saber. Stavros made it very difficult to continue the debate.

The sled eased its way through the office door, past the ComTech; it passed the outer doors, into the corridor. Duncan overtook it as Stavros waited for him. Stavros did not lock into the tracks that could have shot him along at a rate no man afoot could match, but trundled along beside him at a very leisurely pace.

"First thing," said Stavros, :"no more library." And when Duncan opened his mouth at once to protest: "You have to walk among regul over there, and I'd rather not have that. Flower staff can find what you need, if you describe it. Do you understand me?”

"No, sir.”

They walked some distance in silence, until a knot of regul had passed them, and they turned the corner into the upward corridor. "I want you," said Stavros, "to spend your time on Flower as much as possible. Stay clear of the regul entirely. Work at your private obsession through channels, and write me a decent report a full one, this time.”

Duncan stopped on the ramp. "I still don't understand you.”

Stavros angled his sled to look up at him, a sidewise mo­tion of the eyes. "Yes, you do. I want you to apply your tal­ents and prepare me a full report on the mri. Use any authority you want that doesn't involve actually touching the mri themselves.”

"What value is that?" Duncan asked. "I'm no scientist.”

"Your practical experience," Stavros said, "makes such a report valuable: not for the researchers, but for me.”

"I'll need clearance over there.”

Stavros scowled. "I'll tell you something, Duncan, and you listen to me. I don't share your enthusiasm for preserving the mri. They were a plague in the universe, a blight, at best an anachronism among species that have learned their lessons of civilization to better advantage. They are probably the most efficient killers in all creation; but we didn't bring them to ex­tinction, nor did the regul nor did you. They are dying be­cause they have no interest in comprehending any other way of life. No quarter, no prisoners, no negotiation or com­promise: everything is black and white in their eyes, nothing gray. I don't blame them for it; but their way of life was destruction, and they're dying now by the same standard they applied to others: nature's bias, if you like, not mine. Con­vince me otherwise if you can. And be careful with them. If you don't respect them for what they are, instead of what your delirium remembers, then those two mri will end up killing someone: themselves certainly; you, likely; others, very possibly.”

"Then I will be allowed access to them.”

"Maybe.”

"Give me that now, and I can talk with them as the staff can't. Keep the medics and their drugs away from them while they have minds left.”

"Duncan " Stavros started moving again, slowly, turning the corner at the top of the ramp. "You were the one excep­tion to their no-prisoner rule, the one exception in forty years. You are aware, of course, that there may have been a certain irrational sense of dependency generated there, in the desert, in their environment, in your unexpected survival. They gave you food and water, kept you alive, contrary to your own natural expectations; you received every necessity of life from their hands. When you expect ill and receive good instead, it has certain emotional effects, even when you really know nothing about the motives of the people involved. Do you know what I'm talking about?”

"Yes, sir. I'm aware of that possibility. It may be valid.”

"And that's what you want to find out, is it?”

"That, among other things.”

They reached the door of Stavros' apartments. Stavros opened it by remote, slipped in and whipped the sled about, facing him in the doorway. Evans stood across the room, seeming surprised at them: a young man, Evans Duncan looked at him, who had been the focus of his bitter jealousy, and found a quiet, not particularly personable youth.

"Take the afternoon off," Stavros said to Duncan. "Stay in the Nom. I'll prepare an order transferring you to Flower and salving feelings among the civs over there. I'll send you a copy of it. And I expect you realize I don't want any feelings ruffled over there among the scientific staff; they don't like the military much. Use tact. You'll get more out of them.”

"Yes, sir." Duncan was almost trembling with anxiety, for almost all that he wanted was in his hands, everything. "And access to the mri themselves “

"No. Not yet. Not yet. Go on. Give me time.”

Duncan tried to make a gesture of some sort, a courtesy; it was never easy at the best of times between himself and Stavros. In the end he murmured something inarticulate and left, awkward in the leaving.

"Sir?”

Stavros turned the sled about, remembered that he had or­dered lunch when he returned. He accepted the offered mug of soup and scowled at Evans" attempt to help him with it, took it into his own hands. Returning function in his afflicted limbs made him arrogant in his regained independence. He analyzed his irritation as impatience with his own unrespon-ding muscles and Evans merely as a convenient focus. He murmured a surly thanks.

"Files on the mri," he ordered Evans. "And on Sten Duncan.”

Evans moved to obey. Stavros settled and drank the soup, savoring something prepared entirely by humans, seasoned with human understanding of spices. It was too new a luxury after the long stay in regul care to take entirely for granted; but after a moment the cup rested neglected in his hand.

The fact was that he missed Duncan.

He missed him sorely, and still reckoned him better spent as he had just disposed of him. The SurTac had entered serv­ice with him as a bodyguard disguised as a servant, drawn out of combat at war's end to dance attendance on a diplo­mat. Duncan was a young man, if any man who had seen ac­tion at Elag/Haven could ever again be called young. He was remarkable in his intelligence, according to records which Duncan had probably never seen another of the young men that the war had snatched up and swallowed whole before they had ever known what they might have been. Duncan had learned to take orders, but SurTac-style: loners, the men of his service, unaccustomed to close direction. They were usually given only an objective, limited in scope, and told to accomplish it: the rest was up to the SurTac, a specialist in alien environment, survival, and warfare behind the enemy's lines.

Stavros himself had sent the SurTac out to learn Kesrith.

And Kesrith had nearly killed Duncan. Even the look of him was changed, reshaped by the forge of the Kesrithi desert. Something was gone, that had been there before Duncan had gone out into that wilderness his youth, per­haps; his humanity, possibly. He bore scars of it, face half-tanned from wearing mri veils in the searing sunlight, frown lines burned into the edges of his eyes, making them hard and different. He had come back with lungs racked and his breathing impaired from the thin air and caustic dust, with his body weight down by a considerable measure, and a strange, fragile tread, as if he mistrusted the very flooring. Days in sickbay had taken care of the physical injuries, restored him with all the array of advanced equipment avail­able on the probe ship; but there was damage that would never be reached, that had stamped the look of the fanatic on the young SurTac.

The regul bai was correct when he perceived Sten Duncan as an enemy. The regul as a species had no more deadly en­emy than this, save the mri themselves. Duncan hated, and Duncan knew the regul better than any human living save Stavros himself, for they two had come alone among regul, the first humans to breach the barriers to contact between regul and humanity, here on Kesrith.

And most particularly Duncan hated bai Hulagh Alagn-ni: Hulagh, who had done precisely what Duncan accused him of doing, killing the mri who had served regulkind as merce­naries, obliterating a sapient species. Hulagh had done it for desperate fear, and for greed, which were intertwined. But bai Hulagh was moved now by fear of disgrace among his own kind and by dawning hope of gain from humans; he had become stranded on the world he had hoped to plunder, among humans whom he had hoped to cheat and disgrace. And bai Hulagh thus became vulnerable and valuable.

The fact was that one could not, as Duncan tried to do, say regul, and comprehend in that word the reasons and ac­tions of a given member of regulkind. A quasi-nation of mer­chants and scholars, the regul; but their docha, their associations of birth and trade, were each as independent as separate nations in most dealings. Hulagh was of doch Alagn, and Alagn, a new force in regul politics, had stopped the war. The employers of the mri mercenaries who had wrought such destruction in human space were doch Holn, the great rivals and enemies of Alagn.

Doch Holn had ceded Kesrith at war's end, compelled by the treaty; and in the passing of Kesrith to human control, Holn had fallen to Alagn. But Holn had had its revenge: it had cast Hulagh Alagn-ni into command of Kesrith ignorant of mri and of the nature of Kesrith. The weather had turned: Alagn had been faced with the collapse of their effort of evacuation and plunder of Kesrith; and confronted with in­coming humans, Hulagh had panicked. In that panic, seeking to avert human wrath, Hulagh had done murder.

It was possible that by that act of murder, that annihilation of the mri, bai Hulagh had saved the lives of those incoming humans, all the personnel of Saber and Flower, Fox and Hannibal. It was possible that humanity guiltily owed bai Hu­lagh a debt of gratitude, for a sweeping action that human policy could never have taken.

Duncan, who believed in absolute justice, could not accept such a thought; but the truth was that doch Alagn and its ruler, Hulagh, were in every respect useful to Kesrith, most particularly in their reliance on humans and in their burning hatred for doch Holn, who had maneuvered them into this unhappy circumstance. For Duncan, as for the mri, there was only black and white, right and wrong. It was impos­sible to explain to Duncan that Alagn must be cultivated, strengthened, and aimed at Holn, a process too long-range and too little honest for the SurTac.

The mri, moreover, were Holn-hired and Holn-managed throughout their history and it was above all else necessary that what Hulagh had done on Kesrith be final: that the mri species be in fact obliterated, and that Holn not maintain in some secret place another force of the breed, those most effi­cient and skilled killers, for whom Duncan found such tender sympathy. The regul without the mri were incapable of war, constitutionally and physically incapable. With the mri, the regul were capable to any extent. If any mri survived, they could bear no love to doch Alagn for what Hulagh had done to their kind; and personal involvement of the mri in a war, for their own motives and not for hire, was a specter that hung over both Alagn and humanity.

The soup turned sour in Stavros' mouth while he contem­plated what measures might eventually prove necessary with the remaining two mri: Duncan's mri. Duncan was a man of single sight and direct action, innocent in his way; and it was something that Stavros had no wish to do to destroy in the SurTac that which had made him at once a valued adviser and a reliable agent.

He loved Duncan as a son.

For one of his sons, he would have felt less remorse.