Hu Moon was there, still armored and armed. «What happened,» she croaked, in a thick sleep-deprived voice.
Jang shrugged. «They killed him.»
Jang's armor was scuffed and dusty. Here and there were small dents, as if stone fists had shattered against the metal.
Hu Moon knelt beside Irvane's corpse. His neck was purple with bruises; his genitals had been torn away. Dozens of small eruptions of tattered flesh marked him in a random pattern. It almost looked as though the tissues had been ripped open by explosions beneath the skin. I saw that the spiral of fur I found so amusing did indeed continue below his waist, with a line branching off toward his groin, where presumably it had encircled his missing penis.
«How?» asked Hu Moon. «And who were 'they'?»
«Monsters or mineral formations,» said Jang. «Take your pick.» His voice, as controlled as always through his helmet speaker, no longer seemed as polite, a perception that Hu Moon apparently shared with me.
«Could you possibly be less informative,» she said, and turned to face him, her posture expressing cold disapproval.
«Here is my recommendation,» Jang said. He unlatched his helmet and removed it. «Terminate the dig and stand off in orbit until a quarantine ship can get here.»
«What?» Hu Moon barked. «What are you talking about?»
«Two obvious possibilities exist,» Jang said. «Either we've contracted some sort of disease or other condition that causes shared hallucinations with attendant violent behavior... in which case we must not return to any inhabited world, lest it be contagious... or we have some heretofore undiscovered and malevolent life form preying on us, in which case we would be foolish to remain on the surface.»
«An oversimplification, surely!» said Hu Moon sharply. «Aren't we safe here inside the perimeter?»
«Perhaps,» said Jang. «Irvane left the perimeter, apparently by his own choice. The goblins took him away and made use of him before he died.» He indicated an area on Irvane's chest where the flesh was particularly torn. «Cruel kisses,» he said.
I didn't understand what he meant, not immediately. Then I got it -kisses so fierce they ruptured the flesh. I shuddered.
«What did you do about it?» Hu Moon moved away from the corpse, which was indeed difficult to look at. «And what do you mean, 'goblins'?»
«They didn't look like goblins to you?» Jang asked. «They were hard to kill. Very quick, very strong. Stone and quicksilver. I almost died. I destroyed only a few of them. At dawn they went away, or I'd be dead.»
«The important thing is that they're gone,» said Hu Moon.
«It's possible the survivors will be back.» Jang unlocked his gauntlets and removed them. He flexed his fingers slowly, as though they were painful to move.
«But what if they were just a shared hallucination?» Hu Moon asked.
«Then,» said Jang, with a rare glittering grin, «I killed Irvane, and almost killed myself. And I'm here with you, inside the perimeter.»
Hu Moon drew back fastidiously, her finely shaped mouth in a tight line. «We'll discuss this again after you've rested,» she said, and walked away.
No work was done on the site that day.
In the evening we gathered at our usual time to watch the day's computer decoding. I was startled to find that I missed Irvane's phlegmatic presence. Dueine was red-eyed and uncombed; she sat down beside me, ignoring an icy glance from Hu Moon.
«It's terrible, isn't it?» Dueine said. «Did you see him?»
«Yes,» I said, sipping my vegetable cocktail. Tonight I'd put an extra dash of hot sauce in it.
«I didn't.» She looked as though she might start sniffling at any moment. «Moon wouldn't let me. I guess that's better.»
«Umm,» I said noncommittally.
«I didn't like him.» Dueine drew her mouth down into a gesture of distaste. «I always had the feeling he was a lech, and not a nice one, like you.»
I was surprised by this outburst of uncomfortable honesty and didn't know how to reply.
She continued, in a low voice. «Once he asked me how old I was, and when I told him I was twenty-three standard, he didn't seem as interested as before. Do you know what I mean? I look young for my age, I know. Moon says I'll be glad someday.»
I could feel Hu Moon's frozen glare on my back, but Dueine no longer looked like she might burst into tears. Evidently her fright had been replaced by disgust, a more containable emotion.
I couldn't help remembering the faces of the goblins, the faces of angelic children who might do anything. I shuddered. There was some unpleasant connection there that my burned-away imagination might have made, once.
Jang clarified the matter. He slipped in, still wearing the sweat-stained quilted undersuit that padded his battle armor, an air of distraction further masking his face. There was a trembling of nervous energy in the way he moved that I hadn't seen before. He selected a cigarette from the communal humidor, lit it, and took a deep drag.
«I've done a bit of research,» he said, speaking from a cloud of smoke. «We're a somewhat flawed group, and this fact may have something to do with the phenomena we've witnessed these last several days.»
Hu Moon made a faint disparaging grunt. «I don't see...,» she began.
Jang spoke over her. «Let's consider Flash, the dead icicle. He was condemned to brain-limited servitude for a series of murders. These were particularly vile– he killed pregnant human women and eviscerated them.» Jang paused to take another hit. This time no one interrupted him.
«Flash chose his victims carefully,» Jang continued. «They were all very large women. Flash, as you may remember, was a small man. When he was finally apprehended, he was hiding within the body cavity of his last victim. The authorites assumed this was a pattern duplicated in all his murders. He refused to explain his purpose, but the jurists at his trial assumed some psychosexual obsession.»
«He must have been crazy,» Dueine said, unnecessarily.
«Yes,» said Jang politely. «But, as Flash was a nobody, distinguished only by his crimes, no one cared to delve into the whys and wherefores. So he was summarily brainburned and put into inventory.»
We were all remembering the giant dead woman, or so I supposed.
«What about Irvane?» I asked.
Jang sighed and took another puff. «I checked his will.»
«His will?» Hu Moon seemed irritated by Jang's initiative.
He shrugged. «Sometimes people use their wills to seek absolution for past misdeeds or to complain of past mistreatment. I thought it worth a try, since his will became a public record upon Irvane's death. You all signed similar disclosure papers before we embarked.»
«What did you find?»
«Irvane used his will to name his likely assassin, should he be found dead.»
«He was worried about being killed?» Hu Moon seemed skeptical.
«Yes. With good reason,» said Jang. «Irvane's frailty had to do with the sexual exploitation of children. Have none of you wondered what a scientist of his reputation was doing on a relatively unimportant expedition?»
Hu Moon made a hissing sound of disapproval. «There are no unimportant expeditions, in the field of pangalac archaeology.»
«No doubt,» Jang said. «I intended no offense.»
«What did he do?» Dueine asked, oblivious to Jang's attempted diplomacy. Her eyes were wide, and I wondered if she had failed to understand the implications of Jang's words. I am not stupid, and I felt a perverse pleasure in my sudden certainty that Irvane and I were not the only misfits on Graylin IV. On the other hand, I now had further cause for resentment. My crime was spending other people's money. Irvane's was much worse, or so it seemed to me, yet he got away unchanged.