He obviously was not replying.
There were soft cries coming from the other communicator, the one which the customs officials had brought into the room. Mercer was sure that the eye-machine was on and that people in other worlds were looking at Shayol for the first time.
B’dikkat came through the door. He had torn navigation charts out of his lifeboat. With these he cloaked them.
Mercer noted that the Lady Da changed the arrangement of the cloak in a few minor ways and suddenly looked like a person of great importance.
They re-entered the cabin door.
B’dikkat whispered, as if filled with awe, “The Instrumentality has been reached, and a lord of the Instrumentality is about to talk to you.”
There was nothing for Mercer to do, so he sat back in a corner of the room and watched. The Lady Da, her skin healed, stood pale and nervous in the middle of the floor.
The room filled with an odorless intangible smoke. The smoke clouded. The full communicator was on.
A human figure appeared.
A woman, dressed in a uniform of radically conservative cut, faced the Lady Da.
“This is Shayol. You are the Lady Da. You called me.”
The Lady Da pointed to the children on the floor. “This must not happen,” she said. This is a place of punishments, agreed upon between the Instrumentality and the Empire. No one said anything about children.”
The woman on the screen looked down at the children.
“This is the work of insane people!” she cried.
She looked accusingly at the Lady Da, “Are you imperial?”
“I was an Empress, madam,” said the Lady Da.
“And you permit this!”
“Permit it?” cried the Lady Da. “I had nothing to do with it.” Her eyes widened. “I am a prisoner here myself. Don’t you understand?”
The image-woman snapped, “No, I don’t.”
“I,” said the Lady Da, “am a specimen. Look at the herd out there. I came from them a few hours ago.”
“Adjust me,” said the image-woman to B’dikkat. “Let me see that herd.”
Her body, standing upright, soared through the wall in a flashing arc and was placed in the very center of the herd.
The Lady Da and Mercer watched her. They saw even the image lose its stiffness and dignity. The image-woman waved an arm to show that she should he brought back into the cabin. B’dikkat tuned her back into the room.
“I owe you an apology,” said the image. “I am the Lady Johanna Gnade, one of the lords of the Instrumentality.”
Mercer bowed, lost his balance and had to scramble up from the floor. The Lady Da acknowledged the introduction with a royal nod.
The two women looked at each other.
“You will investigate,” said the Lady Da, “and when you have investigated, please put us all to death. You know about the drug?”
“Don’t mention it,” said B’dikkat, “don’t even say the name into a communicator. It is a secret of the Instrumentality!”
“I am the Instrumentality,” said the Lady Johanna. “Are you in pain? I did not think that any of you were alive. I had heard of the surgery banks on your off-limits planet, but I thought that robots tended parts of people and sent up the new grafts by rocket. Are there any people with you? Who is in charge? Who did this to the children?”
B’dikkat stepped in front of the image. He did not bow. “I’m in charge.”
“You’re underpeople!” cried the Lady Johanna. “You’re a cow!”
“A bull, Ma’am. My family is frozen back on Earth itself, and with a thousand years’ service I am earning their freedom and my own. Your other questions, Ma’am. I do all the work. The dromozoa do not affect me much, though I have to cut a part off myself now and then. I throw those away. They don’t go into the bank. Do you know the secret rules of this place?”
The Lady Johanna talked to someone behind her on another world. Then she looked at B’dikkat and commanded, “Just don’t name the drug or talk too much about it. Tell me the rest.”
“We have,” said B’dikkat very formally, “thirteen hundred and twenty-one people here who can still be counted on to supply parts when the dromozoa implant them. There are about seven hundred more, including Go-Captain Alvarez, who have been so thoroughly absorbed by the planet that it is no use trimming them. The Empire set up this place as a point of uttermost punishment. But the Instrumentality gave secret orders for medicine—” he accented the word strangely, meaning super-condamine—”to be issued so that the punishment would be counteracted. The Empire supplies our convicts. The Instrumentality distributes the surgical material.”
The Lady Johanna lifted her right hand in a gesture of silence and compassion. She looked around the room. Her eyes came back to the Lady Da. Perhaps she guessed what effort the Lady Da had made in order to remain standing erect while the two drugs, the super-condamine and the lifeboat drug, fought within her veins.
“You people can rest. I will tell you now that all things possible will be done for you. The Empire is finished. The Fundamental Agreement, by which the Instrumentality surrendered the Empire a thousand years ago, has been set aside. We did not know that you people existed. We would have found out in time, but I am sorry we did not find out sooner. Is there anything we can do for you right away?”
“Time is what we all have,” said the Lady Da. “Perhaps we cannot ever leave Shayol, because of the dromozoa and the medicine. The one could be dangerous. The other must never be permitted to be known.”
The Lady Johanna Gnade looked around the room. When her glance reached him, B’dikkat fell to his knees and lifted his enormous hands in complete supplication.
“What do you want?” said she.
“These,” said B’dikkat, pointing to the mutilated children. “Order a stop on children. Stop it now!” He commanded her with the last cry, and she accepted his command. “And Lady—” he stopped as if shy.
“Yes? Go on.”
“Lady, I am unable to kill. It is not in my nature. To work, to help, but not to kill. What do I do with these?” He gestured at the four motionless children on the floor.
“Keep them,” she said. “Just keep them.”
“I can’t,” he said. “There’s no way to get off this planet alive. I do not have food for them in the cabin. They will die in a few hours. And governments,” he added wisely, “take a long, long time to do things.”
“Can you give them the medicine?”
“No, it would kill them if I give them that stuff first before the dromozoa have fortified their bodily processes.”
The Lady Johanna Gnade filled the room with tinkling laughter that was very close to weeping. “Fools, poor fools, and the more fool I! If super-condamine works only after the dromozoa, what is the purpose of the secret?”
B’dikkat rose to his feet, offended. He frowned, but he could not get the words with which to defend himself.
The Lady Da, ex-empress of a fallen empire, addressed the other lady with ceremony and force: “Put them outside, so they will be touched. They will hurt. Have B’dikkat give them the drug as soon as he thinks it safe. I beg your leave, my Lady… “
Mercer had to catch her before she fell.
“You’ve all had enough,” said the Lady Johanna. “A storm ship with heavily armed troops is on its way to your ferry satellite. They will seize the medical personnel and find out who committed this crime against children.”
Mercer dared to speak. “Will you punish the guilty doctor?”
“You speak of punishment,” she cried. “You!”
“It’s fair. I was punished for doing wrong. Why shouldn’t he be?”
“Punish — punish!” she said to him. “We will cure that doctor. And we will cure you too, if we can.”
Mercer began to weep. He thought of the oceans of happiness which super-condamine had brought him, forgetting the hideous pain and the deformities on Shayol. Would there be no next needle? He could not guess what life would be like off Shayol. Was there to be no more tender, fatherly B’dikkat coming with his knives?