“No. Not with the information you hold. Or not without so deep a memory wiping that no real personality would remain. But you should find life tolerable in my service.”
If you find my service worthwhile, Flandry realized, and if higher-ups don’t overrule you when they learn about me. “I have no doubt I shall, sir. Uh, maybe I can begin with a suggestion, for you to pass on to the qanryf if you see fit.”
Ydwyr waited.
“I heard the lords speaking about, uh, ordering that the man who hired me—Leon Ammon—” might as well give him the name, it’ll be in Rax’s dispatch “—that he be eliminated, to eliminate knowledge of Wayland from the last Terrans. I’d suggest going slow and cautious there. You know how alarmed and alerted they must be, sir, even on sleepy old Irumclaw Base, when I haven’t reported in. It’d be risky passing on an order to your agents, let alone having them act. Best wait awhile. Besides, I don’t know myself how many others Ammon told. I should think your operatives ought to make certain they’ve identified everyone who may be in on the secret, before striking.
“And there’s no hurry, sir. Ammon hasn’t any ship of his own, nor dare he hire one of the few civilian craft around. Look how easy it was to subvert the interplanetary ferrier we used, without ever telling him what a treasure was at stake. Oh, you haven’t heard that detail yet, have you, sir? It’s part of how I was trapped.
“Ammon will have to try discovering what went wrong; then killing those who betrayed him, or those he can find or thinks he’s found; and making sure they don’t kill him first; and locating another likely-looking scoutship pilot, and sounding him out over months, and waiting for assignment rotation to put him on the route passing nearest Wayland, and—Well, don’t you see, sir, nothing’s going to happen that you need bother about for more than a year? If you want to be ultra-cautious, I suppose you can post a warcraft in the Mimirian System; I can tell you the coordinates, though frankly, I think you’d be wasting your effort. But mainly, sir, your side has everything to lose and nothing to gain by moving fast against Ammon.”
“Khraich.” Ydwyr rubbed palm across chin, a sandpapery sound—under the storm-noise—despite his lack of beard. “Your points are well taken. Yes, I believe I will recommend that course to Morioch. And, while my authority in naval affairs is theoretically beneath his, in practice—”
His glance turned keen. “I take for granted, Dominic Flandry, you speak less in the hope of ingratiating yourself with me than in the hope of keeping events on Irumclaw in abeyance until you can escape.”
“Uh—uh, well, sir—”
Ydwyr chuckled. “Don’t answer. I too was a young male, once. I do trust you won’t be so foolish as to try a break. If you accomplished it, the planet would soon kill you. If you failed, I would have no choice but to turn you over to Morioch’s inquisitors.”
Chapter XIII
The airbus was sturdier and more powerful than most, to withstand violent weather. But the sky simmered quiet beneath its high gray cloud deck when Flandry went to the Domrath.
That was several of Talwin’s eighteen-hour days after he had arrived. Ydwyr had assigned the humans a room in the building that housed his scientific team. They shared the mess there. The Merseian civilians were cordial and interested in them. The two species ate each other’s food and drank each other’s ale with, usually, enjoyment as well as nutrition. Flandry spent the bulk of his time getting back into physical shape and oriented about this planet. Reasonably reconciled with Djana—who’d been caught in the fortunes of war, he thought, and who now did everything she could to mollify her solitary fellow human—she made his nights remarkably pleasant. In general, aside from being a captive whose fate was uncertain and from having run out of tobacco, he found his stay diverting.
Nor was she badly off. She had little to fear, perhaps much to gain. If she never returned to the Empire, well, that was no particular loss when other humans lived under the Roidhunate. Like a cat that has landed on its feet, she set about studying her new environment. This involved long conversations with the thirty-plus members of Ydwyr’s group. She had no Merseian language except for the standard loan words, and none of her hosts had more than the sketchiest Anglic. But they kept a translating computer for use with the natives. The memory bank of such a device regularly included the major tongues of known space.
She’ll make out, Flandry decided. Her kind always does, right up to the hour of the asp.
Then Ydwyr offered him a chance to accompany a party bound for Seething Springs. He jumped at it, both from curiosity and from pragmatism. If he was to be a quasi-slave, he might have a worse master; he must therefore see about pleasing the better one. Moreover, he had not inwardly surrendered hope of gaining his freedom, to which end anything he learned might prove useful.
Half a dozen Merseians were in the expedition. “It’s fairly ordinary procedure, but should be stimulating,” said Cnif hu Vanden, xenophysiologist, who had gotten friendliest with him. “The Domrath are staging their fall move to hibernating grounds—in the case of this particular group, from Seething Springs to Mt. Thunderbelow. We’ve never observed it among them, and they do have summertime customs that don’t occur elsewhere, so maybe their migration has special features too.” He gusted a sigh. “This pouchful of us…to fathom an entire world!”
“I know,” Flandry answered. “I’ve heard my own scholarly acquaintances groan about getting funds.” He spread his hands. “Well, what do you expect? As you say: an entire world. It took our races till practically yesterday to begin to understand their home planets. And now, when we have I don’t know how many to walk on if we know the way—”
Cnif was typical of the problem, crossed his mind. The stout, yellowish, slightly flat-faced male belonged to no Vach; his ancestors before unification had lived in the southern hemisphere of Merseia, in the Republic of Lafdigu, and to this day their descendants maintained peculiarities of dress and custom, their old language and many of their old laws. But Cnif was born in a colony; he had not seen the mother world until he came there for advanced education, and many of its ways were strange to him.
The bus glided forward. The first valve of the hangar heatlock closed behind it, the second opened, and it climbed with a purr of motor and whistle of wind. At 5000 meters it leveled off and bore north-northeast. That course by and large followed the river. Mainly the passengers sat mute, preparing their kits or thinking their thoughts. Merseians never chattered like humans. But Cnif pointed out landmarks through the windows.
“See, behind us, at the estuary, what we call Barrier Bay. In early winter it becomes choked with icebergs and floes, left by the receding waters. When they melt in spring, the turbulance and flooding is unbelievable.”
The stream wound like a somnolent snake through the myriad blues of jungle. “We call it the Golden River in spite of its being silt-brown. Auriferous sands, you see, washed down from the mountains. Most of the place names are unavoidably ours. Some are crude translations from Domrath terms. The Ruadrath don’t have place names in our sense, which is why we seldom borrow from them.”
Cnif’s words for the aborigine were artificial. They had to be. “Dom” did represent an attempt at pronouncing what one of the first communities encountered called themselves; but “-rath” was an Eriau root meaning, approximately, “folk,” and “Ruadrath” had originally referred to a class of nocturnal supernatural beings in a Merseian mythology—“elves.”