##
Later, when Miji was out and sleeping in his burrow, Rohant manage a brief look at his prize. It was indeed a stunrod-small, short range, but all he needed to take out the flesh guards. He opened a half-inch of the hem of his shirt, slid the rod into the opening, and went to work on figuring a way of distracting or disabling the android.
“I went,” she told Rohant when he came back. “I didn’t know what to expect. What I saw was odder than I expected, still… I don’t know.
“Digby was sitting in a pulochair inside an image bubble; he was a square brown man with black eyes, wide cheekbones, and a smile that could light up all of Spotch-Helspar. I liked him the minute I saw him. He had a good smell, well, you know what I mean. It was the same thing with that odd creature Frittagga Addams. Anyway, I let him take the language extract, then we talked. And he told me he already knew what part of the problem was. The Watchman program.
“‘You’re running it on full cycle, aren’t you.’
“‘Yes, that’s the way I was told to do it when I bought the androids.’
“‘Everyone is. The jacals love it that way.’
“‘What?’
“‘I suspect that’s what you’ve got raiding your stocks. Someone hired a jacal, probably to get the jinnkitt, I hear you’ve refused three separate offers for it.’
“‘Yes. We won’t deal with brokers and we won’t sell where we don’t trust.’
“‘Right. You know the reason why Watchman androids are sold in threes?’
MEMORY:
It was early days for Voallts Korlach. They’d just opened the compound in Spotch-Helspar, Miralys was pregnant with Lissorn and they had a single Capture ship out bringing in stock for their cages. Rohant was their sole Capture Chief and his cousin Napos ran the ship. In addition to the Dyslaerors they had four Grydeggin trackers in their capture team, a University-trained Katsitoi triad acting as a communal xenobiologist and two Trumpet Viner Cousins as ecologists, setting the pattern for mixed crews that Voallts Korlach continued till the present day.
A series of thefts had been giving Miralys fits. Despite sentries and a triad of watchman androids, someone had been getting to the stock, carrying off small but valuable birds, beasts, reptiles. The thief had twice got close to their most valuable beast, a pure white Mersallan jinnkitt with a base worth of fifty thousand Helvetian gelders, its actual price probably double that. Miralys had already turned down two bidders, because she didn’t like the way they smelled. A third had used a broker; she sent the broker away without bothering to listen to his offer. It was something she and Rohant had agreed on from the beginning. They would not sell so much as a feather through brokers, the buyers had to represent themselves. They wanted to know where their stock was going and what was going to happen to it.
“I was wondering what to do next,” she told Rohant when he got back, “when Zimaryn brought in this card, it made me laugh, there was this mini-holoa up in the left corner, a shovel dancing. Silly thing. Of course I’d heard of Digby and Excavations Ltd. Is there anyone on Spotchals who hasn’t? I wasn’t sure what to think of him and his business and most of all his prices.
“The… well… the exceedingly ambiguous being who sent the card in, I’ll say she for convenience’s sake, was a blonde beauty, I’m not that good at judging the attractions of outsiders, but it seemed to me she was rather past her prime. She sat in the pulochair, crossed her legs and smiled at me, and said her name was Frittagga Addams.
“I tapped my claw on the card and gave her the hoteye.
“‘Why?’ I said.
“‘Five thefts in the past three months. Police nowhere, though they’re trying. Here on Spotchals the P-T-B like to encourage young, healthy, expanding enterprises.’
“‘Young. So right,’ I said. ‘We can’t possibly afford Digby’s fees, even if they’re only half what they’re rumored to be.’
“‘Digby is willing to take his fee in services rather than gelders.’
“‘Specify.’
“‘Digby is a man with a voracious hunger for knowledge. Dyslaera are very little known outside of Dysstrael. He wishes to learn the language and history of your people. Nothing sacred or private, just whatever is public knowledge, what you teach your children. If you will provide a language extract and would agree to come and talk with him once a week for the next year, he’ll consider that sufficient fee for his services.’
“‘Which are?’
“‘He will discover the thief, the means by which the thefts are accomplished and, if possible, recover the stolen stock. He can’t guarantee this last, because he doesn’t know the purpose of the thefts.’
“‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to consult the Family first.’
“‘Do that, then come and speak with him. You’ll see.’
“‘Wouldn’t it be better for him to come here so he can see the place?’
“‘Not possible. Come. You’ll see.’
“And then she left.”
“I quoted the brochure to him,” she told Rohant. “I was irritated; he was belaboring the obvious so I might as well respond in kind: ‘To insure flexibility of response and reaction speed in a casing of reasonable size, memory capacity is limited. The intake must be sorted and downloaded every three hours; the three androids must download in staggered series so that at least one is at full efficiency at the moment when one is taken out of circuit. What’s wrong with that?’ I said, ‘It only takes a minute.’
“‘It means that the jacal has an opportunity to raid every hour of the night. He had already acquired plans for your pens, he knows when the full-response droid is as far away as it’s going to get, he chaffs the half-loaded droid, overwhelming its intake, flips in his scoop and gets the target out before the full-response can locate the trouble and cross the intervening space. He can do it over and over again, whenever he wants. If you add flesh guards, he’ll kill them. I take it you’ve moved the jinnkitt once or twice?’
“‘Yes. First night, it was off its feed, we had it in the infirmary. The second time was just before a client was coining to look at it. We were grooming it and playing with it so it would be in good spirits.’
“‘Right. That’s the only reason you still have it. The first part of the answer is simple. Change the routine. New pattern of patrol every night, for one thing. For another, download after one hour, not three. You keep your droids livelier, time down is much shorter, and the change in pattern will annoy the jacal no end.’
##
“I hadn’t thought of that, Ro, it was such a simple change and so obvious, once he said it. It was worth whatever trouble this chatting business put me to. Besides, I liked the man, I already liked talking to him. I did what he said, we caught the jacal, Digby got enough on the one who hired him, a turd named Tambaedee, to scare him off, and the rest you know.”
Omphalos was using the same android every time they came for him; it had a scratch underneath its right vision-lens which gave it a rakish look, almost like a dueling scar. He was sure they were keeping it on full-cycle, twice he’d seen signs it was near saturation, a faint hesitation in its movements, a sluggishness in its responses. The first time was before he had the stunrod, the second time they made him strip in the cell before they took him out, they were taking him to a special session in the lab, so he had to leave the rod behind.
Now he was cultivating a hunter’s patience, waiting quietly till all three factors clicked in.
It would happen soon. Had to be soon. Before they gave up on Miralys and moved him to Black House.