“Kill him!” said Heleb.
“Be quiet!” retorted Guur, in no mood to be told what to do. “Heleb, you will move along the wall a little way, in the direction from which we came. Have your gun ready. Seviir—guard the other approach. Kaat—watch the jungle.”
He paused while they moved to obey. Then he relaxed a little.
“Why are we here, Mr. Rousseau?” he asked quietly.
I didn’t imagine that he wanted a discussion on matters of metaphysical philosophy. His concerns were more immediate.
“They’re watching us,” I told him. “We can’t see them, but I’ll lay odds that they can see everything we do. Maybe they can eavesdrop on our thoughts—I don’t know. They want to see how we react, and I think your Spirellan friend may already have disappointed them.”
Guur drew his lips back from his teeth. He really did look half-wolf, half-crocodile, and his breath was worse now than it had been before.
“I don’t think we have many secrets,” he said. “You have small bruises on your neck, Mr. Rousseau, and so have I. My kind has a better sense of time than yours, and I know that twelve days have passed since I was captured. They have had time to examine us very thoroughly, and may have methods of examination better than any we know. Do you not agree?”
“It seems that way,” I conceded. He was ugly and evil-minded, but he was no fool.
“When you assume that they will be disappointed to see us fight,” he went on, “do you take it for granted that they are leaf-eaters, like the Tetrax?”
I gathered that he didn’t think too much of leaf-eaters. I resolved to remember that if ever I wanted to drive a vormyran wild with fury, that was probably the insult that would do it.
“I don’t know what they eat,” I replied. “But think of it this way: the inhabitants of Asgard probably didn’t know that their world had been discovered by people from elsewhere; they might not even have realised that the universe outside Asgard was inhabited. If you suddenly discovered that the outer layers of the big onion where you’d been hiding for millions of years had been invaded by inquisitive outsiders, what kind of people would you like them to be?”
He replied with a phrase in what I could only presume was his native tongue.
When I looked at him blankly, he translated. “It means,” he said, “ ‘things edible.’ Prey.”
“People aren’t prey,” I told him.
“vormyr have no word for ‘people,’ ” he told me. “We have a word for predators and a word for prey. Humanoids fit into one category or the other, as do all animal species.”
“You can’t operate that way in a civilized community,” I informed him, piously.
“So the Tetrax say,” he sneered. “Like all leaf-eaters, they practice the ethics of the herd: the ethics of cowardice, the denial of life and strength. There are two kinds of being, human. There are those whose way it is to eat, and those whose way it is to be eaten. The true law demands loyalty to the tribe, respect for fellow predators and the careful control of those to be eaten. We are prudent predators, human, but we never forget what we are. We move quietly and stealthily among the herds of the Tetrax and their kind, because herds of leaf-eaters can be very dangerous—but we know who we are. We never forget the true way of being, the true civilization.”
I had always assumed that gangsters were naturally stupid, and that those galactic races which preserved the morals of crocodiles were essentially simple-minded. Amara Guur clearly didn’t see things the same way. I’d always resented the fact that the Tetrax considered humans as barbaric as the vormyr, because I’d always considered it obvious that, whereas the vormyr really were barbaric, humans weren’t so bad; the vormyr obviously had a very different view of the matter—they presumably felt insulted to be put in the same category as us.
“That’s stupid,” I told him. “You can’t decide whether you owe someone moral consideration on the basis of what he eats; you have to do it on the basis of intelligence.”
I knew as soon as I’d said it that he wouldn’t be at all impressed. I could even think of several arguments he might use in response. After all, you could argue that what we are and how we think is very largely determined by what we eat. Maybe I could see both sides of the argument, because I was an unrepentant omnivore. But he didn’t want to continue the discussion at that level. To him, it was perfectly obvious that the opinions of any lousy bunch of leaf-eaters didn’t matter a damn, and his kind had retained that conviction even while they coexisted with dozens of herbivorous species in the galactic community.
No wonder, I thought, they get on so well with the Spirellans. No wonder everyone else hates their guts. No wonder they’ve established their own delinquent subculture in Skychain City.
I recalled that Sleaths were vegetarian. It no longer seemed surprising that they’d murder a man just to put me in the frame. To Guur, it wasn’t really murder, because a Sleath wasn’t worth an atom of moral consideration. I wondered what he thought of me.
“I suppose you think the ones who are watching us are good predators,” I said. “That they put us in this cage to see how good we are.”
Guur turned away, looking first at Khalekhan’s dead body, then at the luscious flowers of the forest.
“No,” he said, sadly. “They are leaf-eaters. I would like to think otherwise, but everything tells me it is so.”
“Everything?”
“Armour,” he said. “Armour is the investment of leaf-eaters. The predator is quick and sleek—his weapons are offensive. None but they who feed on seed and branch would armour a world as this one is armoured, and hide themselves as these ones hide. These are not hunters; they are those who would grow fat. Like the Tetrax, they would make their food in machines, dead and bland, vile and unclean. The universe is full of herds, who do not like the ones who truly live. But the law bids predators be prudent. The predator is clever, the predator deceives. The ethics of the herd preserve the herd, but only until the day when the hunter comes. This herd already knows what we are, and what we can do—it does not fear us, but it fears what we are. It fears the hunters who are still to come.”
“You could lay down your arms,” I suggested, “and try to soothe those fears a little.”
I knew it was useless. A real leaf-eater suggestion. He didn’t care what the watchers would think of him. He was a predator.
“The predator is clever,” I repeated subvocally. “The predator deceives. Like hell.”
“The star-captain’s a predator too,” I told him. “She just got back from wiping out an entire world. I couldn’t say for sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Salamandrans were meat-eaters too. I may look like a leaf-eater, but the Star Force are right at the top of the food chain—take my word for it.”
He was still staring into my eyes, though his pupils had shrunk now to thin vertical slits, so that his eyes were a dark orange from rim to rim, like angry flames.
“Your kind is confused,” he told me. “You feel the strength of the true law, and yet you capitulate with the ethics of the herd. You seek a balance that cannot exist, and it weakens you. Your kind does not know whether it is a tribe or a herd, and I can use that. When the star-captain sees that I have you, she will hesitate. She will try to bargain for your life, and she will lose her own life in consequence of that hesitation.”
I thought he was probably wrong, but I didn’t know whether that was anything to be glad about. In fact, I didn’t know how to react at all, and in that uncertainty I suppose his point was proved. I was confused all right.