Ypsir looked down at her with pride. “Tell the nice men your name,” he urged softly, as if talking to a trained animal or a child.
“I’m Ass,” she purred. “I’m a baaad Ass.”
“And why are you named Ass?”
“ ’Cause Ass was ’sassin. Ass try to kill Master.”
He was under control now, perfectly so, and glanced out of the corner of his eye at the others. They were still looking only at him.
“And what happened when you tried?”
“Master too smart. Master too wise for Ass. Master so generous. Master no kill Ass. Master no hurt Ass. Master make Ass love him. Master take ugly, evil ’sassin, make into Ass, to love Master.”
Despite the depravity of the scene, this was becoming interesting, he thought. If they retold her that much, how much did she know of her former self? Not enough to recognize him, certainly. This was different from what he expected, yet it was consistent. Ypsir wanted her to know.
“Do you remember who. you were?”
She looked slightly confused by that one. “Ass not ’member old self. Ass no want to ’member.”
“Are you happy now, Ass?”
“Oh,, yes!”
“Would you want to be anybody else—anybody or anything in the whole wide universe?”
“No, no, no, no, no. Ass loves being Ass. Feels so good.”
Ypsir looked up straight at him. “Your former agent.”
“Very creative,” he responded dryly, sipping at his drink. “And very lovely. Maybe we missed a bet, Lord Ypsir. Maybe we should have made you into a gorgeous beauty like that instead of sending you to Medusa. That’s what you would have done with you.”
Ypsir’s face clouded, and he literally shook with emotion, his inner self coming out in the twisting of his face, in his expression, in his every mannerism. It was a frightening, totally evil visage, a demonic creature that could no longer hide behind the mask of the cheery politician for very long.
He was about to add more, but felt Morah’s arm touch his and thought better of it. He’d done his job, and that was all that mattered, but he took a strong pleasure in twisting Talant Ypsir’s vision of beauty back upon him by applying the Medusan’s standards to himself.
Ypsir took a minute or-so to regain control, and slowly that terrible demon faded and the cheery politician was back with only a nasty leer remaining. He knew now, though, that he was in complete control, and his self-confidence, which had been badly wavering, flowed back into him in a grand surge. He also now knew that, while he still couldn’t believe in a god, he would always afterward believe in the existence of pure evil.
The rest of the evening was strained, but he found the right balance that not only Morah but the other Lords could approve. Not that Ypsir didn’t try, parading Ass, making her do pretty disgusting and degrading things, and pushing him as far as the Medusan could push using her, but to no avail. Ypsir fought his war with grand and ugly gestures; he fought back with sarcasm and flip comments, and totally frustrated the great Lord of Medusa. It was a very rare evening, really, he told himself, equally unpleasant, and rewarding.
Morah got him out of there as soon as dessert was finished, though. Ypsir would be boiling, horrible mad for hours after. Still, the Charonese was more than impressed by his behavior, and seemed to regard him even more as an equal now than before.
“He will kill you if and when he can,” Morah warned him. “Ypsir is not used to losing face so badly. Only the presence of the other Lords restrained him tonight, for his object is not ours.”
He nodded. “Shall we meet the Altavar now? I don’t care how foul they smell—they almost have to be a breath of fresh air compared to the company we’ve been keeping this night.”
“Come with me,” Yatek Morah said.
The smell was pervasive and pretty much as Morah had warned. On a full stomach it almost made him gag, and he restrained the impulse to do so only with the greatest difficulty and discomfort.
The Altavar were not quite what he expected. They bore a general kinship to the demons of the ice, but only a kinship, in the same sense that Ass was generically related to Commander Krega.
The first thing that struck him was the sheer alienness of the special quarters for the three Altavar. The lighting Was subdued, the furniture odd and blocky and totally unfamiliar in form or function, and there was an odd, figure-eight shaped pool of water to one side. He knew the creatures were watching him with interest, but he couldn’t really tell how. The retractable tentacles and odd, heart-shaped pads on their “heads” were familiar, but their bodies trailed into a large, nearly formless mass that seemed constantly in motion. They did not walk, but oozed as they moved, leaving a slender trail of slime behind them. Obviously none of these creatures could fly, or move very fast at all.
The one nearest to him and Morah moved to a small device and extended a flowing stalklike appendage until it reached the box and actually seemed to enter it through a small compartment on the side. A speaker crackled.
“So this is the one who caused so much trouble, Morah.” The voice, totally electronically synthesized, sounded eerie as the dank enclosure added reverb to its already inhuman tones.
Morah bowed slightly, although whether or not the gesture had any meaning to the creatures couldn’t be known. “He wished to meet you prior to the talks.”
“Why?”
The question seemed addressed to either one of them, and so he answered. “Partly curiosity. Partly to add to my knowledge. And partly because protocol demanded it.”
“Ah, yes, protocol,” the alien replied. “It seems important to your people.” It paused a moment. “You hold yourself well. In many ways you remind us of the one called Kreegan.”
“We were from the same place and in the same profession originally,” he told the Altavar. “I suspect we thought more alike than either of us would have admitted. You respected Kreegan, I know. I hope that I may earn a measure of that respect tomorrow.”
“You and he wished to save your people. This is a normal and natural thing to us, and we weakened out of our compassion. We hope sincerely that we did not err on that basis, for the cost will be far greater to you and infinitely greater to us if we did. It was our original intent, you know, to eliminate a number of your worlds in a carefully measured pattern so” that your technological capabilities would be broken for at least three centuries. This would have allowed us the necessary time to complete this phase of our task.”
He was appalled at this revelation, and the casual way in which it was delivered,’ appalled as Marek Kreegan must have been many years ago when, assuming his rank as Lord of Lilith, he had first met this or some similar Altavar. Say there were nine hundred human worlds, seven hundred of them the civilized worlds. Three billion per civilized world, and an average of a half-billion for the others, would be—The Altavar was talking about eliminating over one trillion, three hundred and twenty billion people! And now, the creature had said, the risk was far greater than that!
He drew in his breath and swallowed hard. “Let me get this straight. You wished to eliminate over a trillion of us so that we could not interfere with your activities for three centuries?”
“It has worked in the past,” the Altavar said calmly. “The last time we did not do it with a civilization it cost us dearly in time, lives, and materiel, and your own civilization is easily ten times the largest we have encountered before.”