Sweat had sprung forth upon her, until her coverall stuck dripping to her skin. She began to shake, as if with fever. Her ears buzzed. “I would have destroyed you,” she said. Her voice sounded remote and unfamiliar. A still more distant part wondered why she bothered speaking to the unconscious, in her own tongue at that. “I wish you hadn’t acted the way you did. That made me remember what the computer said, about Donli’s friends needing you for study.
“You’re too good a chance, I suppose. After your doings, we have the right under Allied rules to make prisoners of you, and none of his friends are likely to get maudlin about your feelings.
“Oh, they won’t be inhuman. A few cell samples, a lot of tests, anesthesia where necessary, nothing harmful, nothing but a clinical examination as thorough as facilities allow.
“No doubt you’ll be better fed than at any time before, and no doubt the medics will find some pathologies they can cure for you. In the end, Moru, they’ll release your wife and children.”
She stared into his horrible face.
“I am pleased,” she said, “that to you, who won’t comprehend what is going on, it will be a bad experience. And when they are finished, Moru, I will insist on having you at least, back. They can’t deny me that. Why, your tribe itself has, in effect, cast you out. Right? My colleagues won’t let me do more than kill you, I’m afraid, but on this I will insist.”
She gunned the engine and started toward Lokon, as fast as possible, to arrive while she felt able to be satisfied with that much.
And the days without him and the days without him.
The nights were welcome. If she had not worked herself quite to exhaustion, she could take a pill. He rarely returned in her dreams. But she had to get through each day and would not drown him in drugs.
Luckily, there was a good deal of work involved in preparing to depart, when the expedition was short-handed and on short notice. Gear must be dismantled, packed, ferried to the ship, and stowed. New Dawn herself must be readied, numerous systems recommissioned and tested. Her militechnic training qualified Evalyth to double as mechanic, boat jockey, or loading gang boss. In addition, she kept up the routines of defense in the compound.
Captain Jonafer objected mildly to this. “Why bother, Lieutenant?
The locals are scared blue of us. They’ve heard what you did—and this coming and going through the sky, robots and heavy machinery in action, floodlights after dark—I’m having trouble persuading them not to abandon their town!”
“Let them,” she snapped. “Who cares?”
“We did not come here to ruin them, Lieutenant.”
“No. In my judgment, though, Captain, they’ll be glad to ruin us if we present the least opportunity. Imagine what special virtues your body must have.”
Jonafer sighed and gave in. But when she refused to receive Rogar the next time she was planetside, he ordered her to do so and to be civil.
The Kiev entered the biolab section—she would not have him in her living quarters—with a gift held in both hands, a sword of Imperial metal. She shrugged; no doubt a museum would be pleased to get the thing. “Lay it on the floor,” she told him.
Because she occupied the single chair, he stood. He looked little and old in his robe. “I came,” he whispered, “to say how we of Lokon rejoice that the heaven-borne has won her revenge.”
“Is winning it,” she corrected.
He could not meet her eyes. She stared moodily at his faded hair. “Since the heaven-borne could… easily… find those she wished… she knows the truth in the hearts of us of Lokon, that we never intended harm to her folk.”
That didn’t seem to call for an answer.
His fingers twisted together. “Then why do you forsake us?” he went on. “When first you came, when we had come to know you and you spoke our speech, you said you would stay for many moons, and after you would come others to teach and trade. Our hearts rejoiced. It was not alone the goods you might someday let us buy, nor that your wise-men talked of ways to end hunger, sickness, danger, and sorrow. No, our jubilation and thankfulness were most for the wonders you opened. Suddenly the world was made great, that had been so narrow. And now you are going away. I have asked, when I dared, and those of your men who will speak to me say none will return. How have we offended you, and how may it be made right, heaven-borne?”
“You can stop treating your fellow men like animals,” Evalyth got past her teeth.
“I have gathered… somewhat… that you from the stars say it is wrong what happens in the Sacred Place. But we only do it once in our lifetimes, heaven-borne, and because we must!”
“You have no need.”
Rogar went on his hands and knees before her. “Perhaps the heaven-borne are thus,” he pleaded, “but we are merely men. If our sons do not get the manhood, they will never beget children of their own, and the last of us will die alone in a world of death, with none to crack his skull and let the soul out-” He dared glance up at her. What he saw made him whimper and crawl backwards into the sun-glare.
Later Chena Damard sought Evalyth. They had a drink and talked around the subject for a while, until the anthropologist plunged in: “You were pretty hard on the sachem, weren’t you?”
“How’d you—Oh.” The Krakener remembered that the interview had been taped, as was done whenever possible for later study. “What was I supposed to do, kiss his man-eating mouth?”
“No.” Chena winced. “I suppose not.”
“Your signature heads the list, on the official recommendation that we quit this planet.”
“Yes. But—now I don’t know. I was repelled. I am. However—I’ve been observing the medical team working on those prisoners of yours. Have you?”
“No.”
“You should. The way they cringe and shriek and reach to each other when they’re strapped down in the lab and cling together afterward in their cell.”
“They aren’t suffering any pain or mutilation, are they?”
“Of course not. But they can believe it when their captors say they won’t. They can’t be tranquilized while under study, you know, if the results are to be valid. Their fear of the absolutely unknown—Well, Evalyth, I had to stop observing. I couldn’t take any more.” Chena gave the other a long stare. “You might, though.”
Evalyth shook her head. “I don’t gloat. I’ll shoot the murderer because my family honor demands it. The rest can go free, even the boys. Even in spite of what they ate.” She poured herself a stiff draught and tossed it off in a gulp. The liquor burned on the way down.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Chena said. “Donli wouldn’t have liked it. He had a proverb that he claimed was very ancient—he was from my city, don’t forget, and I have known… I did know him longer than you, dear. I heard him say, twice or thrice, Do I not destroy my enemies if it make them my friends?”
“Think of a venomous insect,” Evalyth replied. “You don’t make friends with it. You put it under your heel.”
“But a man does what he does because of what he is, what his society has made him.” Chena’s voice grew urgent; she leaned forward to grip Evalyth’s hand, which did not respond. “What is one man, one lifetime, against all who live around him and all who have gone before? Cannibalism wouldn’t be found everywhere over this island, in every one of these otherwise altogether different groupings, if it weren’t the most deeply rooted cultural imperative this race has got.”
Evalyth grinned around a rising anger. “And what kind of race are they to acquire it? And how about according me the privilege of operating on my own cultural imperatives? I’m bound home, to raise Donli’s child away from your gutless civilization. He will not grow up disgraced because his mother was too weak to exact justice for his father. Now if you will excuse me, I have to get up early and take another boatload to the ship and get it inboard.”