Nightfall_at_Algemron

"That's what I mean, partly. You were with me for this part, too, but not the part I saw—if 'saw' is even the word."
He told her about the creatures he had heard inside the major. She listened with the rapt and concerned look of someone attending to a sleeper newly wakened from nightmare. "Horrible," she said at last. "Where would such a thing have come from? Did that man know it was— they were—inside him?"
"I don't think so," Gabriel said. "I got a sense that it was controlling him very delicately, but it won't always be doing that. It will slowly get stronger and stronger, and he will become weaker and weaker until finally he will be no use to what is inside. Then it will—" He rubbed his head, for it was beginning to ache a little. "I think it will move on and find another host somehow, or breed, or both."
She shuddered. Gabriel could completely understand the reaction.
"There was more to it than that," he said.
Gabriel fell silent for a moment, turning the stone in his pocket over and over. He probed in a gingerly manner at the memory of his encounter with the creature's thoughts—no, their thoughts—as if it had
been Ricel's memories that he had just now been turning over. In a way, he was half afraid to do it, for the things with which he had been in contact were still alive, and Ricel was dead. That Ricel, anyway.
"There were many more of them," he said, "many more. tangles, I guess that would be the word. Many colonies, living inside various people, various hosts. I don't think the hosts necessarily have to be human. It doesn't matter. They can communicate, I think, over long distances—if communication is even really the word for it."
"What are they doing?" Enda whispered.
"Controlling people," Gabriel said. "It's all about control."
"To what purpose?"
Gabriel probed the memory again but got nothing back. "I'm not sure," he said slowly. "There wasn't a lot of that, but there does have to be a purpose."
He closed his eyes and looked into his mind again, trying to bear more weight on the images. Very slowly, with difficulty, they began to resolve in places. The paradigm seemed to be hologrammatic. Even the most fragmented part of one thought or image-in-thought seemed to preserve parts of others, many others.
What Gabriel got this time was not so much an image as a concept. Others. There are more like us, not like us in terms of species, but in motivations, intentions. They want what we want. We want what they want, what they will have.
More. More like us.
He opened his eyes, shook his head, then decided not to do that again, for the headache was becoming blinding.
"There are a lot more of them," he said softly, "a big group of some kind"—he searched for the proper word—"an association. Different creatures meeting for a common purpose."
"What purpose?"
He held his head quite still. "I didn't get enough," he said, "or I can't get more now. For all I know, they get together to play cards."
"Gabriel," Enda said, "this is most terrible. Someone must be told about these creatures." "Who?" Gabriel said.
"Your friend Lorand Kharls at least," Enda said.
Gabriel had been thinking about that. "I don't know," he said. "I have a few days to decide about that yet. Just." He leaned forward, rubbing his head. "It's hard to interfere with communications in transit, I know that once a message goes into a relay, those conduits are pretty much watertight, yet at the same time I'm not sure that they're completely safe from tampering. I would really hate for someone to decrypt this information and start spreading it around. People are paranoid enough as it is, but more to the point, if it got out, and someone or something associated with these things worked out that the information had come from me." He shook his head. "Life for the two of us is dangerous enough at the moment. I don't want it getting more so. If I become a target for some secret society of unknown aliens, then so do all of
you ." "If you do not pass this information on to someone able to make the most of it, and quickly," Enda said, "you put more people than just us in danger as well. What if something should happen to us after we leave Crow? It would be unethical to leave this plane of existence without having passed on this information."
Something about the turn of phrase was amusing, and Gabriel cracked just a slight smile. "I'll endeavor not to do that," he said.
"If you are going to play the situational ethics game at this elevated a level, Gabriel," Enda said, "you must play it fairly and from both sides at once, which is, at any rate, the requirement for any truly talented player. We are all in a position to make our own choices about how to face this new danger, but you, I think, have a responsibility to protect those who are not able to make the choice for themselves by making sure the data that defines the necessary choices is in the hands of those who must have it. If you are uncertain about passing this information to Lorand Kharls via transmission, you must consider whether it is now time for you to do so in person."
"The only way I could do that," Gabriel said, "would be if Concord forces took me to him, and you know what that would mean."
"Of course I do," Enda said. "I did not say the consideration would be a simple matter or necessarily pleasant, except insofar as any ethical act is pleasant in and of itself."
Rather to Gabriel's horror, he could see her point. "No," he said, "pleasant probably wouldn't be the word I would choose, especially not after Ricel." He shuddered.
"What did happen to him?" Enda said.
Gabriel let out a long angry breath. "There are two possibilities," he said, "and both of them might be true. One is that coming face to face with me and having that little contretemps so compromised what he was doing there that he had to suicide immediately, knowing that the Galvinite police would be on him within a few minutes. The other is that somehow I killed him."
Enda looked at him in shock. "Gabriel, you would never—"
"Oh, wouldn't I?" Gabriel said. He was angry at himself, partly because until yesterday he would have agreed with her. "Did I set off one of his conditioning triggers by being in his mind and wanting to kill him? Did his own mind misread that as an instruction to die, right then because that was what I wanted him to do?"
Enda opened her mouth and closed it again.
"I don't know," Gabriel said. "I might have killed him." He turned away. "I told Kharls as much in my report. That will go out via the drivespace relay at the Lighthouse."
"I take it you did not care to return to Aegis to use the relay there?"
"No," Gabriel said. "I want a little while to recover from what happened, and when I finally go back into Concord space again, I might as well surrender myself because there's no chance of finding any further evidence to clear me. The one man who might have done that is dead."
"Delde Sota wondered," Enda said, "whether you were being made over in some other image." A harder one, Gabriel suddenly "heard" her think. There were no words as such, but he got a quick image of reactions, emotions, edges being sharpened, tempered. To hone, Enda thought, or to shatter against the rocks…?
Gabriel blinked and said, "Maybe." He was unwilling to respond in speech to the intercepted thought, not being sure what kind of protocol there might be among fraal for such things. "Whether I am or not, they're waiting for me, and it might look better if I go to meet them willingly rather than having to be dragged."
Enda nodded. "Your choice." "What will you do?" Gabriel asked.
Enda gave him a thoughtful look. "If you have a while to make your larger choices," she said, "so do I, but I think it is safe to say that you will not be alone to make them. Meanwhile, there are less fraught choices before us. Sugar in your chai or black?"