"But you are not really Tlad, are you?" Jon said.
For all his beastial appearance, this tery had such a quick mind. Dalt tried to match his quickness but could come up with no lie that would ring true enough to save his cover. He thought carefully before he spoke. The tery respected him, felt indebted to him — he had come through the fright field because he thought Tlad was in trouble. Why destroy that store of confidence with an obvious fabrication?
"No, I'm really Dalt. Steven Dalt."
"But you are still my friend, are you not?" Jon asked with a pleading innocence and sincerity that Dalt found touching.
"Yes, Jon, I'm still your friend. I'll always be your friend. I'm here to help the teries and the psi-folk, and I'll need your help most of all to do it."
Jon was staring around at the ship's interior.
"Can we leave here? I don't like it here."
"Of course. But first…" Dalt reached a hand toward the tery's right shoulder and removed a fine silver thread. "You won't be needing this tracer any more. I planted it on you before you went to Adriel's rescue. I've got them here and there among the psi-folk. Helps me keep track of things."
He laid the thread on one of the consoles, then picked a small disk from a slot by the lock and placed it in the tery's hand.
"Hold onto this as we walk through the ‘fear.' It will protect you from it. I've got one in my belt buckle."
Together they walked undisturbed through the shimmer that hid Dalt's craft, and the neurostimulatory field that guarded it. They stopped in the shade of some neighboring trees.
Dalt seated himself cross-legged on the grass and motioned for the tery to join him.
"Get comfortable and I'll tell you all about myself. After I'm done I hope you'll know enough to want to keep what you've just seen a secret."
"As long as it helps Adriel and the others."
"Good enough."
Where to begin? he thought. This isn't going to be easy.
He started with a historical perspective — how the mother world devised an ingenious method to colonize the stars and get rid of all its malcontents, dissidents, and troublemakers in a single stroke: a promise of one-way passage to an Earth-type planet to any group of sufficient size that wanted to set up the utopia of its choice. It became known as the era of the splinter worlds, and there was no shortage of takers. Soon most of the habitable worlds in a sphere around Earth were peopled with all sorts of oddball societies, most of which collapsed within a few years of landfall.
The Shaper colony proved an exception. Its pioneers were all well-grounded in science and technology and managed to build a viable society. Their goal of a world of physically perfect human telepaths was close to completion when the Teratol clique took over. That was when teries were formed; that was when the Hole was started; and finally, that was when the virus that caused the Great Sickness — the pandemic holocaust — was born.
A small group of the surviving Shapers banded together during the plague. They saw their civilization coming apart and wanted something preserved, so they gathered samples of all the available technology of their time into one spot and sealed it up. They then wrote a brief history of the colony in five volumes and buried it for posterity. Before they, too, succumbed to the Great Sickness, they beamed the contents of the volumes into space.
The message was received. But this was in the days of the beleaguered outworld Imperium that had little interest in rescuing diseased Shapers. So the message was dutifully recorded and forgotten. After the LaNague Federation rose from the ruins of the Imperium, the Cultural Survey teams were started in an attempt to bring surviving splinter worlds back into the mainstream of humanity. That was when the transcript of the five-volume transmission was found.
Steven Dalt, fresh from his infiltration of the feudal splinter culture on Kwashi, was given the job.
"Are you following me so far?"
The tery neither shook his head nor nodded. "What is a planet?" he asked.
"What's a pla —?"
Dalt then realized that for all his native intelligence, Jon's mind was too unsophisticated to grasp cosmological concepts. The stars were points of light, the planet on which they stood was "the world," and the primary it circled, "the sun." Dalt’s talk of the LaNague Federation and splinter worlds and interstellar colonization had been lost on the tery — like discussing the big bang theory with someone who still believed in a geocentric universe.
Yet Jon had listened patiently and with interest, whether through personal regard for Dalt or through a desire to have someone — anyone — address him as a fellow rational being, Dalt could not say.
"Let's put off that explanation for some other time, Jon, and just accept the fact that I was sent from a faraway land to see how things were going here."
Things were not going at all well, as he had discovered soon after landing and camouflaging his craft. A preliminary survey had located the population centers, made language recordings, and returned to Fed Central. Dalt absorbed the language — a pidgin version of Old Earth Anglic — via encephalo-augmentation and was readied to pose as one of the natives to assess their suitability to handle modern technology. Since they favored hard consonants in their male names, he’d turned his own around. And since he did not want too close contact with the locals, he posed as a reclusive potter deep in the forests.
His advent coincided with Mekk's order for extermination of the Talents and he found himself acting as potter and confidant to a unique group of telepaths. Here was something every Cultural Survey operative dreamed of finding: A group of humans split off from the mainstream of the race, developing a separate and distinct lifestyle. This was the very purpose for which the CSS had been formed.
But on this planet they were marked for extinction.
So Dalt had sent an urgent request by subspace laser for an intervention by the Federation Defense Force to protect these psis and let them follow their course. And had been turned down.
"It's up to you and me, my furry friend," he told Jon. "I'll get no help from my friends back in my homeland — and I can't even use a blaster, though I'll be damned if I won't carry one with me when we go to the Hole — so we're going to have to carry the show. Let's go see Rab."
— XXI-
"Here's an entry port to the observation corridor," Dalt said, pointing to a small, dark blot on the map. Then he sketched an arc with his finger. "And here's the perimeter of the routine patrols around Mekk's fortress."
The blot fell between the arc and the fortress.
"We can sneak past the patrols," Rab said.
"We need to do more than sneak. We're going to have to dig our way in. The port is buried."
Rab frowned. "That's a problem. They'll catch us sure."
"That's where your people come in. Can we count on them?"
"Of course. What do you need?"
"A war."
"Now wait just a —"
"A small war," Dalt said with a smile. "One played by our rules."
— XXII-
The Talents moved their camp deeper into the forest, putting more distance between themselves and Mekk's fortress. Then the archers moved forward and ringed the fortress in small groups.
The war began.
The Talents developed into a perfectly coordinated guerrilla force, striking then disappearing like fish in the sea. When Mekk's generals sent a hundred men out to search the surrounding trees, they found nothing. When they sent ten men out to investigate a minor disturbance, none came back.
The net result of these seemingly random skirmishes was a gradual withdrawal of the patrol lines toward the fortress, a tightening of the perimeters, just as Dalt had intended. This gave him, Rab, and Jon a chance to locate the old entry port.