“That’s right. You’re Fellah, and I’m Sally.”
“Sal-lee. Daff. Yowiyargawsh. Fellah.”
“Your-?“ Krater began, then shook her head.
“Other… that deaded the Daff. Younyargawsh named itself”
“Oh, the kzin warrior.”
“Yes, kzin. Dead itself now. But other still to come.
Find you-Sallee.” Fellah seemed to grow agitated. “Find you-human. Make dead too.”
“Excuse me,” Jook interrupted. “But what the hell are you?”
The creature paused. “You-Fellah means, is one, of-class Pruntaquilun. Named itself Coquaturia.”
“But what are you?”Jook insisted.
“You-Fellah is… sing-maker?” it answered, unsatisfied with the result. “Song-maker. You-Fellah is owned-thing of Thrint named itself Guerdoth. You-Sallee, you-human, are not owned-thing? Yes. You have no… no Discipline?”
“Of course we have discipline,” Cuiller responded quickly. “We’re a Navy survey team, after all. Without discipline we couldn’t perform-”
“Captain,” Sally Krater said quietly, putting a hand on his arm. “You’re going too fast. And I don’t think that it’s-that Fellah is questioning your authority.”
“Of course not,” Cuiller said stiffly.
The dog was staring hard at him. “You-Captain are Thrint?”
“Thrint? Are you calling me a Slaver?”
“You-Captain… you impose Discipline.” The creature exhibited a rippling motion that might have been a shrug. “Thrint.”
“There are no Thrintun anymore,” Krater said. “They died out-oh, along, long time ago, while you were in the stasis-box that Daff opened.”
Fellah turned its head patiently and watched her speak, studied the way her mouth moved, as if trying hard to understand.
“Many Thrintun” Fellah said gravely. “Too many to be deaded, to die soon… What means ‘long, long time’?”
“That’s an approximation of age,” Jook interposed. “Consider it to be a large part of the age of the universe itself. About one-fifteenth of that age.” Jook had to explain this using his hands. He waved his free hand all around, to indicate the universe at large. Then he flashed his spread fingers three times, curling them off each time with his other hand.
The animal seemed to absorb this, to think about it, and then looked stunned. “No Thrintun anymore. No Pruntaquila anymore. No universe anymore.” Fellah made a noise back in the throat that might have been a whimper or a moan.
“The universe is still here,” Sally said easily.
The creature just stared at her.
“Hey, are you hungry?” Krater suddenly asked. She pulled out of her pocket some plastic-wrapped patties, which looked to Cuiller like some kind of dried meat. “We found these in the stasis-box,” she explained to the commander. “Daff tried them but he thought the taste was pretty bland.” She offered part of one patty to Fellah.
The animal backed away.
“Tnuctipun,” it growled. “Head-stuff. Made dead, made cold, dry”
“What?” Krater dropped the fragment, and it slid between the leaves. “Why were the Tnuctipun killed?”
“Secret.” Fellah turned away. “Big secret.”
“Kill them and freeze-dry their brains?” Cuiller wondered. “Why would a Slaver want to do that? It’s barbaric!”
“Maybe the Thrint wanted to preserve them,” Jook speculated. “Any sufficiently advanced technology would be able to reconstruct the brains later, rebuilding their RNA linkages through some kind of computer setup-and remember, the Tnuctipun were genetic engineers. Rendering the brain inert is like insurance. That way you could keep your pet scientist quiet, but you also keep him around in case you need him to make adjustments in whatever he built.”
From the position of Fellah’s head, Cuiller could see that the dog was listening closely. How much was he understanding?
“So what did these Tnuctipun build?” Cuiller asked. “Fellah himself?”
“Not likely,” Sally Krater offered. “Fellah said he was ‘of-class,’ part of a race, called the Pru… Pruntaquilun. But here!” She drew along, sticklike device out of her belt. “This was in the stasis-box, too.”
“What is it?” Cuiller asked, taking it from her.
“I don’t know. It looks like some kind of musical instrument.”
Fellah at first regarded it with keen-eyed interest, then turned his head away.
“Fellah?” the commander asked suddenly. “Do you know what this does?”
The animal looked back at him, reluctantly. “Stick thing.”
“But what did the Thrint do with it?”
“Point at head. Work fingers. Reach deep inside. Set mind in-”
“Is it something the Thrint used to fiddle about with your brains?” Jook asked, trying to overcome the word-hurdles for Fellah.
“Yes, fiddle. Itself name, Fiddle.”
“It’s the source of the Slavers’ power, then,” Jook went on eagerly, to his crewmates. “It has to be And all this time we thought they were mentalists. But instead they had these shock-rod things. ‘Fiddle,’ he calls it.”
“My-Thrint,” Fellah said slowly, “my-master, used it, it was secret…”
“Of course it would be a secret,” Jook explained. “They would keep the existence of the Fiddle from their subject races, hiding it as a musical instrument or pretending it was something else benign. In that way they could maintain the myth of their innate power. And they would be willing to kill in order to preserve their secret-as those freeze-dried brains prove.”
Cuiller, who still held the Fiddle, brought it up near his face and fitted his fingers awkwardly to the keys. He pressed them in no particular order. And nothing happened.
“I can hear music,” Krater said. “Or, sort of. Anyway, it’s… silvery, like bells and woodwinds, far off.”
Cuiller tried a different pattern of fingering.
“Yeah, me too,” Jook said. “Kind of..
Nyawk-Captain had been trailing the remaining human for hours, walking in his powered armor across the ground while the human swung invisibly through the high branches. His reworked radar easily tracked the quarry’s particular carbon pattern as it moved east then south, pausing occasionally to rest in the trees.
Twice he had to detour around the glimmer of large white shapes, which passed in the distance under the forest roof. They did not see or sense him, and each time Nyawk-Captain was able to regain the trail of the human’s passage.
After most of the morning, when the sun was high, the prey paused once more. This time, however, it joined two more pattern signatures that had been showing to the west of it. The monkey troupe was forming up.
Nyawk-Captain shed his bulky armor, left the locator beside it, and began climbing a nearby bole. By his calculations, he was almost under the humans as they paused in the forest canopy. He moved as quietly as he could, gripping with his forepaws around the trunk’s side and pushing with his feet and claws against the bark.
Arriving approximately at the humans’ level, and shielded by green fans from their sight, he extended his natural ears and listened to their ongoing conversation. He understood only the vaguest fragments of spoken Interworld but soon realized the humans were talking about the Thrintun and their long-ago time. He picked up the word for “master.”
Nyawk-Captain was preparing himself for the forward rush that would put an end to these human thieves and intruders on his mission-when he suddenly froze. Through a gap in the greenery he saw one of them pointing a wandlike object at him. And he could not move!
The human diddled its fingers, and Nyawk-Captain felt his paws twitch, his leg kick, his tail go stiff. Either the humans had recently developed a psychokinetic power unknown to the Patriarchy, or this was a display of power from the Thrintun artifacts they had discovered in the box. Experience and common sense suggested the latter.
As the device worked his body over, Nyawk-Captain could also feel his attitude toward the human holding it begin to change, becoming mellow and accepting. Nyawk-Captain hated that! After a few seconds, the human stopped diddling the keys of the device and turned away.
Nyawk-Captain was himself again.