Barath said nothing.
But Mukh’than didn’t wait for his approval. “I was a darr’pakh.”
“I don’t know that word.”
“It’s what we call a certain kind of teacher, one who is given total control over the life of a Riirgaan child, for one critical year in that child’s development. During that year, before the child receives any other formal education, it’s permitted no contact with friends, or family, or any adults other than the darr’pakh and the other students under the darr’pakh’s care. Forbidden to speak, permitted only to listen, the child spends that year learning the one lesson most sacred to us, the one lesson we never share with outsiders, the one lesson we think every adult Riirgaan should know.” Mukh’than dropped the empty water tube on the dirt and ground it beneath his foot, not stopping until it snapped. “I stopped teaching that lesson, Barath. After twenty seasons of pounding the same ideas into one student after another, I grew weary of my sacred task and simply abandoned it. I changed the lesson plan and spent one year teaching the students at my retreat another lesson, an irrelevant lesson. My crime was not discovered until after all my charges were returned to their families.”
The Riirgaan’s words had the bearing of broken stumbling things desperate to escape a place that had imprisoned them. But it did not seem to be pain that afflicted him. It didn’t look like pain.
Barath would have asked what the false lesson was if not for the dread fear that the Mukh’than would have needed a full year to teach it. “Why?”
“Weakness. Boredom. The usual temptations. You know.”
“And what happened when your people found out?”
The Riirgaan’s shoulders shuddered again. “Among my kind, the sacred lesson must be learned that year, or not at all. The crime was thus irreversible. None of the children could go on to live useful lives. All were removed from their families. Most were committed to internal exile, or to institutions where they still rot today. Some of the unmanageable ones were euthanized.” Mukh’than turned and cocked his head in a manner that could have been bitterness or amusement. “I was long gone. I knew the disgrace that awaited me otherwise. But given a chance, I would do the same thing all over again. The lesson changed me more than it changed them.”
Barath, whose sense of morality had always been subject to his personal convenience, felt the special kind of revulsion that afflicts the merely flawed in the presence of genuine evil. He hadn’t felt anything like this with Magrison. The human may have been something beyond all imagining once, but that which had burned in him before was all but extinguished by age and infirmity now. It still raged inside the Riirgaan. “Why would you tell me that story?”
“Because,” Mukh’than said, with nauseating calm, “I don’t want you to invest too much hope in my skills as a teacher.”
Our human has been ancient, even by the longer-lived standards of his people, for longer than any of us have been alive. He was ancient even when I was a child still fresh from the litter, curious about anything and everything that walked the world around me, and fascinated most of all by the sad-eyed creature whose only purpose seemed to be storing unhappy memories. He is so old that holding on to breath could only be an act of open defiance against the spirit who brings release at the end of life.
The Trivids said no, of course. It was inevitable that they would: few peoples in their position would have surrendered something so familiar to charges they neither understood nor saw any reason to believe. They reported their verdict to Mukh’than, with all due solemnity; Mukh’than reported it to Barath, with the smugness of a being who has just had his brilliant predictions fulfilled; Barath muttered some of the fouler curses known to his people, with the resentment of a starving creature promised but repeatedly denied sustenance. Then the villagers dispersed, but for a single ridgeback who lingered long enough to leave the two off-worlders with one final message.
Mukh’than rubbed a finger across his cheek as the ridgeback scurried away. “It says they want us to leave. They say we make them uncomfortable: you with your anger, myself with…”—a pause, rare among the Riirgaan’s usual smooth translations—“something they find just as disreputable.”
“And yet they keep him. They don’t consider mass murder disreputable?”
“They do,” Mukh’than said. “But they still consider him theirs. They will let us stay another night, but we will not be safe here if we stay much beyond that.”
Barath’s claws emerged without his conscious consent. He clicked them together, feeling them scrape against each other, yearning for the warm bubbling reward of blood—though whether he most ached to slice the Trivids, the Riirgaan, or Magrison was something even he did not know. He did know it had less to do with the severity of the Human’s crimes than with his own frustration at being denied. “We have weapons. Can we take Magrison by force?”
Mukh’than studied him for several seconds, his frozen features hiding a response that might have been anything from horror to enthusiasm. Transparent lids lowered halfway over the great empty blackness of his eyes. “Are you saying you’re prepared to kill them?”
“If they get in our way…”
“They’ll get in our way,” Mukh’than said, with absolute certainty. “If not before we take him, then afterward. Or do you think we can outrun the natives while carrying an invalid we’d need to keep alive?”
“We can keep them at bay. Threaten to kill him if they don’t let us go.”
“They’ll still follow. And send runners to other villages. The further we run the more surrounded we’ll be.”
“Then we outfight them first.”
“Kill one of them in such a fight and you’ll have to kill all of them. Even assuming they don’t manage to bring us down, a lone witness hiding somewhere beyond the tree line would be able to spread word of crimes committed against indigenes—and that’s not all that popular a practice, even in this orifice of a world. Word of it will be up and down the river long before we reach the nearest outpost. We’d wind up retreating to the jungle and spending the rest of our lives dodging spears and living on bugs and worms.”
It was pretty much how Mukh’than lived now, absent the spears, but Barath’s short glimpse of the filthy lean-to the Riirgaan had constructed for himself had not recommended it as a lifestyle to be actively sought. But the need to suggest something, anything, kept Barath going: “The authorities might forgive us if we had the monster with us.”
“The humans have a hateful history, but they’re much more bound by the morality of interspecies protocol than you suppose. You can read the annals of their Diplomatic Corps if you doubt me. But let us suppose we take your course. What if we kill them all, take our time getting back, and Magrison still doesn’t survive our journey to the river? How will we be forgiven for filling a village with corpses just so we could produce the one the authorities want?”
Barath’s claws now fairly throbbed with impotent anger. As much as it galled him to acknowledge that the twisted Riirgaan could be correct about anything, it was all true. Without the consent of the natives, they really did have no recourse grander than bringing the evidence back to what passed for civilization and hoping that the Hom.Saps who followed up played fair when it came to the reward. And yet, the prospect of a lengthy hike back to the river, enduring Mukh’than’s company, without success to make up for it, seemed more nauseating still. “We’ll think of something before we leave.”
“Do you truly think so?” Mukh’than asked, then added a few sardonic words in his native language.