The Dreaming Dragons Part 13

'We are gathered,' the many voices chanted, though some continued their sobbing, 'to rejoice in the Translation of our comrades.'

'The Nesting Place and the Resting Place are One.'

'Where the children are made,' the people murmured, calming now under the ritual, 'the discorporate congregate in their wisdom.'

'Where the s.e.m.e.n and ova of Consciousness are joined, the Flesh is brought forth. Where the Flesh pa.s.ses away, the Consciousness of the Dead is born into Eternal Life.'

'The Flesh returns to the Flesh,' the people said, in the twilight of the night season, 'and the Spirit goes on in the Spirit.'

'Our sorrow is right and proper,' Anokersh told them, 'for our comrades have gone away from us. Yet they go only to await us. Their Spirit has not perished, even as their Flesh shall not perish. Let us find joy in our grief, for as we revere the bones of their death they shall comfort and guide the blood of our life.'

Lesser Sacerdotes took up the antiphony as Anokersh stepped forward. Diitchar carried the golden bowl, placing it carefully as the dead ones' kin lifted the bodies, their poor singed feathers flaking away in the dim air, and carried them in turn, reverently, before the knife and the vessel. The blade slashed, opening the necks. Blood, ruby-red, held from clotting by the medic's postmortem injection of heparin, gushed into the deep bowl, misting in the chilly air. Anokersh felt his own pulse quicken as he gazed at the splas.h.i.+ng libation. His mouth filled with a spasm of saliva, and his belly quailed, as always, in a contraction of incipient nausea. With abrupt insight he recognised the emotion as an a.n.a.logue of the dizzy faintness that took him, took them all, when any attempt was made to grapple with the problem of the feral pongids. A spearing migraine burst above his eyes. The insight was lost on cross-currents, swirling eddies that evaporated -- He forced his attention back to the corpses before him. Drained of blood, they lay once more on the stainless steel of the catafalques. Plaintive, the ancient chants closed their dying fall. How inappropriate it is, he thought, so far from the true Place of Birth and Re-birth. A pitiful sham. He felt, in that moment, abandoned, forsaken. We are the instruments of a great purpose, he rebuked himself. We have no rights of complaint.

Soon the dead would speak, resolve his doubts. He momentarily caught the clouded eye of the Intercessor, swaying in her filmy cloak, half-deranged already by the sacred drugs. Swiftly he moved forward into the crowd pressing to the biers. It was shameful, an abrogation of tradition, that all the craft's crew were not here, yet the exigencies of their plight precluded it. At the perimeters, watch officers must stand at their posts, governing the slow pongid sentries. Others still must remain on duty in Control, lest the ferals somehow seize this opportunity to redouble their mischief.

'People of the Mission,' he said, 'we come to do homage to our brothers, who pa.s.sed from our midst defending the integrity of _The Soul_. For Ghine do Lod and Thall huj Salder, death has been more than Translation, it has been their glory. Now we do them the final honour, recalling as we eat and drink in their memory those last moments when they faced without fear a foe more terrible than Nature's mute forces -- ' He choked, and in silence took from Stezna do Nen the heavy surgical lancet. It buzzed against his thumbs as he activated the rapidly vibrating blade.

Standing by the body of Ghine do Lod, he had a sudden image of Rhiona's brutalised hands, the excised fingers. Was it a parody of this sacred rite? Trembling, he thrust the image aside and addressed the corpse. His first incision slit the downy skin of the belly from groin to neck. Stezna, and Jik huj Lod -- the dead male's clan-kin, Anokersh noted distantly -- stood to either side of the catafalque in ceremonial robes; they reached forward and peeled the opened skin from the body, exposing the layer of subcutaneous fat which gleamed dull yellow under the auroral sky.

Two clean strokes continued the incision from the neck, across the deep ribcage, to lay back the skin of each arm along the scaly ventral undersurface. Two more extended from groin to taloned feet. As his acolytes eased back the burnt skin, shrivelled and hard in patches where the feral's energy blast had seared it, Anokersh deftly took the surgical knife through tendons and gristle, severing muscles from the powerful slas.h.i.+ng weapons of the feet. He placed the dismembered feet in a silver vessel brought to him by his spouse, and moments later added the relaxed, bloodless hands.

In the cold breeze, plasma oozed from the raw flesh, sticky under his fastidious touch. Jik and Stezna, familiar with surgery, swiftly rolled the skin to the corpse's muzzle. At Stezna's muttered reminder, Anokersh incised the scalp; freed, the pelt came away and was folded gently over the jointed extremities.

The chief medic pa.s.sed a power-saw to Anokersh. A diapason of grief rose from the gathering as the Director trepanned the skull. A stench of burning bone moved on the air. Anokersh slid his thumbs into the cranial cavity, and drew forth the small double-lobed brain; it came out with a moist, sucking sound and slipped into a waiting vessel.

The sheet of banded muscle tugged at the vibrating lancet as he bent back down over the belly, slicing into the abdominal wall. Stripping back the muscle, he removed one by one the internal organs: the ma.s.sive looping intestine, the kidneys, liver, heart, the pink sponge of the lungs. He took particular care with the gall bladder, lest he rupture it, loosing its bitter green fluids.

Eviscerated, the corpse was almost unrecognisable. Litanies soared and fell, ambiguous voices. Anokersh completed the paunching, taking the bright specialised instruments from Stezna and laying them aside slick with dark juices. He butchered the carca.s.s, then, jointing the limbs, carving the flesh delicately away from the bones in long strips and slices. The final disposition of the spinal cord, the ribs, the pelvic girdle, he left to experts: the bones must, where possible, remain inviolate.

At last he rose. The mortal remains of Ghine do Lod lay all about him, piled raw in the sacramental vessels. An acolyte fetched him scented water; he washed his hands, shaking slightly from the tension, and turned to the corpse of Thali huj Salder.

The quivering pitch of the wake tightened even further when finally he put aside the hot knife and once more dipped his aching hands. In the consummation to come, the dismantled dead would speak, make utterance from that pinnacle of illumination which the quick might never attain unaided. The sighing, half exhalation of exhausted pain, half exaltation of expectant mystery, broke again and again against that tension like the indigo waves of the numinous, icy holorama. Anokersh lifted his arms and sang: 'In this Place of love and terror let us lose ourselves.

'As each of us speaks in the common tongue, 'Each is a syllable of the Great Utterance.

'We commend to the Parents the lives of these newly dead, 'Ushering them into the Womb of eternal delight.'

In the swift blurring of his perceptions, the echoing multiple overlays, Anokersh heard the ma.s.sed voices join his in the invocation; one voice, not his, not Diitchar's, not maimed Riona's, not any of the several voices of those strong figures bent toward him in the dusk: 'We ask as a People, each clinging no longer to the isolation of the finite ego-self, for the blessing and wisdom of that mult.i.tude-made-One gone before us to beat.i.tude.'

And a single voice once more, his, yet in the streaming lambency a voice speaking from no fixed place, no single throat, as he bowed to the golden bowls, the silver vessels and distributed the raw gobbets of flesh, the succulent meat of their brothers: 'Let us eat and drink of our comrades, Ghine and Thali, that as their cells mingle with ours the ancient covenant of Peace shall be affirmed, to take life neither in hot anger nor cold calculation, and the wisdom of the discorporate Spirit announce itself in our midst.'

Hungrily, in an elevation above greed or revulsion, Anokersh tore at the strips of tepid meat with his carnivore's rending teeth, gulped at the sweet feast, sent his snout again and again to the salty liquid. With enormous tact, then, he drifted back from the banquet, his tongue seeking the last of the blood adhering at his mouth, and awaited the benediction from the Intercessor's lips.

When she spoke, it was in a high strange quaver, drug-slurred, an utterance to the One People from the pseudo-soul mapped in the Ancillary Core.

'Life returns on its way into a mist, its speed into its quietness again: existence of this world of things and men renews ultimately their never needing to exist.'

She choked, spittle at her lips. 'Again knowledge will study others, wisdom is self-known and muscle masters brothers; self-mastery is bone; content may never need to borrow, ambition will wander blind, and as vitality cleaves to the marrow leaving death behind. The universe is deathless because having no infinite self it stays infinite. Clarity has been manifest in heaven and purity in the spirit. Consciousness has no death to die.' The Intercessor sagged; her feathers drooped, her tail jerked spastically. Strong hands, her clan-kin, took her at the armpits and held her erect.

The Director looked into her foggy eyes and asked gently, through her: 'Do we speak with Thali huj Salder, with Ghine do Lod? Tell us, comrades, was your Going-Hence a good voyaging? Are you sojourners in bliss?'

Her eyes reeled. Syllables stammered. Anokersh felt cold, colder than the chilly, contrived breeze. The dead took up his physical dread and spoke it aloud from the Intercessor's clattering jaw: 'A a a cold a k k k cold coming we had of of of it. Just the worst ti time of the year for a j j journey.'

Thali's widow screamed. This was not the way of it. All the dead were at rest, among beat.i.tude, dandled in the temporary peace of the Ancillary Core, awaiting their reconciliation with the Race when the Mission's voyage was done, when at last in the completion of that million-year epic the protective gluon s.h.i.+eld might be let down, opening once more the Soul Core to the delirious flux of universal consciousness. Yet the Ancillary Core was diseased, Anokersh knew with horror, as he had always known and denied; their temporary haven, their greater extension, their life was run amok. He laid his hands on the fragility of the Intercessor and shook her. 'Tell us of beat.i.tude,' he demanded desperately. 'Speak to us of your Pa.s.sing-Over.'

She threw back her head and howled like a mindless pongid slavey.

'We are running to the Children's Orientation Centre,' she cried shrilly. 'Yes, we hear it ahead of us. It looms. O Parents of All, it burns with a fiery nimbus. A power cable, torn from the wall, is in its hand. Sparks fly in a scorched cascade. Heat blooms from its touch. We are on fire, we burn, we burn. It turns away. The hull is melting. We are dead. Oh Thall, I can't move. There is no pain, Ghine. Can we be Translated? I didn't know it'd be so cold. What's the humming? I can't hear you, Thali. Everything is so dark and cold. That terrible buzzing, that screaming saw. Are they eating us already? But I'm not dead. _I'm not dead!_'

Anokersh stood aghast. The dead were lost, trapped in their terminal agonies. Never before had he witnessed a post-mortem communication from anyone who had died brutally, in pain, without the comfort and the songs of their companions. Those who had vanished into the cancerous Core zone and not returned had been beyond reach of the Intercessor; he had a.s.sumed that they were not yet Gone-Hence. Now he saw another, more appalling possibility. Had they perished in this agony, caught in a loop of meaningless loathing? But the Old Ones, the Parents of all, were sketched in the Ancillary Core. Surely they would reach out, guide and comfort the dying -- Silence fell. Stezna do Nen glanced up from the diagnostic float which monitored the Intercessor. He scowled at the Director, but said nothing. When the female spoke again, all the harsh shrillness was gone. Her voice came with a tranquillity near to woodenness.

'We move in the Birth Ca.n.a.l. The light is deepest red. We float. There is small resistance to our contractions. Ah! The bodies lie below us, ahead of us. Alas, the plumage is in sorry array. Communications, give me a private channel to Diitchar rhal Lers. How strange, it's leaking. Dii, edge back and go through the shaft. We leave the shaft. Here the light is golden. Ah! Ah! Are you the Parents? How sweet, how warm. Such light! It flows, it gusts, it is a wind, there is a fine taste of blood. We have come home.'

The terror slowly ebbed from Anokersh. Head lolling, body rocking slightly, the drugged female hung in the arms of her clan-kin. Aurora shook the sky. Diitchar took his hand and squeezed it tightly. Abruptly, the somnolent female jerked up her head and stared directly into his eyes.

'Confusion is here. We must not rest. Anokersh huj Lers, there is peril to the Mission. Other voices jabber. Do you see? Attention must be paid! Knowledge will study others. At the interface. Corrosion is here. Our tongues are bound. One has said to you, you have no future. The jabber must be stilled. See to it.' Then the blinding potency was gone from her gaze; she slumped utterly, and Stezna was at her side with an injection jet.

Little enough remained of joy, of harmony, of rea.s.surance in the ceremony. With a stubborn loftiness Anokersh saw it through to the end -- the farewells to the departed, in formulae ill-wrought to suit those restless, minatory beings, the reminders to the living-in-flesh of their Mission and the gift they bore, a benefice locked away from their collective reach, the final sacramental partaking of the last shreds from Ghine's and Thali's bones, and the consignment of those dull pale remnants to the cryogenic mausoleum -- but panic gnawed at him, reduced him untimely to the isolation of his ego-self, stole the charity from his words.

'Mistress,' he said urgently to Diitchar as the gathering dispersed uneasily, 'we must go down at once to the feral.'

'I know it.'

At last he dared admit the truth to himself. 'The wild simians have found more than sanctuary in the crystal ma.s.s. They have broached the resonance. The computers have been in error.' His words stumbled at the blasphemy: 'The souls of another species have intruded within the Ancillary Core.'

His spouse turned her golden head. 'I have known this since the creature first spoke. They possess intelligence. They have evolved.'

'First we must hear what Riona can tell us.'

The artist T'kosh huj Nesh had taken his spouse back at once to the Recuperation bay at the ceremony's end. Initial exhaustion and the stress of the Going-Hence had brought her near to incoherence. She rested on a null sleeper under soothing solar panels. Questioned, she could recall little. She trembled at the gateway to hysterical fugue. Only fragments of her ordeal remained, and those she resisted: blurred endless periods of vague horror; stark images of crooked, humped, bloated monsters whose ancestors had once been pongid slaveys -- fanciful images that hinted more at nightmare than truth, for the selection pressures shaping the pongid they had seen must have been ferocious; running, tripping, torn by the blade-edges of the s.h.i.+mmering crystal Core. And among the nettles of that awful time were other people, others who had been stolen into the prismatic jungle. Sane or insane? Riona could not remember. For her, the boundary was too immanent....

Stezna do Nen woke the creature for them. Anokersh leaned close to its flat face as the induction currents brought its cerebral rhythms accelerating up from the nadir of coma to the rapid flutter of alert awareness. For a second time he felt shock as the blue eyes opened to pierce his soul with their intelligence. The pongid turned its head aside with distaste.

'Take your rancid breath away. I smell the blood of your kin, and it sickens me.'

Anokersh brought up his arm deliberately and slapped the creature with tremendous anger. The sound of the blow was unbearably loud, and pain closed his thumbs across his palm; the Director came close to cringing from his action. Blood gushed from the creature's nostrils, brighter in this light than the blood he had drained from the corpses of his brothers.

'You shall speak only to answer us, animal.' His fury returned, and a gross, unfamiliar l.u.s.t worked from his belly to his groin in a wave of heat.

The beast snarled. Its teeth were square and flat. Along its scalp, bristles rose. It said nothing. Foam-padded steel left it barely s.p.a.ce to breathe.

Diitchar, with cold sardonic contempt, said: 'Animal, do you have a name?'

'If I were an animal,' the creature told her with equal scorn, 'I would have a name like Frizzle, or Rutter, or Muncher. Do you take me for one of your mute, pathetic monkeys? My name is my own, and of no importance to you. I do not think you will mistake me for a snake.'

For all the barbarous slurring of his speech, the beast's diction was comprehensible. Anokersh was filled with an incredulous loathing, tinged with curiosity.

'Let us be magnanimous,' he said. 'We shall give you a name commensurate with your status. Prisoner,' his tone hardened, 'why have you come here?'

The nasal bleeding had ceased; congealed clots clung obscenely at the Prisoner's whiskers, along its broad upper lip. 'I am only the first,' it said thickly. 'Soon the tribes will be ready to follow. We shall crush the snakes beneath our heels. We shall drive you interlopers whence you came, to the dark places beyond the world's circle.'

Cant, Anokersh thought, astounded. The rhythms of ritual, of rage clarified to ba.n.a.lity but retaining still some link to the dynamo of emotion. He was thunderstruck, as much by the implications, the near-comical misapprehensions embedded in the pongid's outburst as by the continuing absurdity that an autonomous simian could utter any intelligible words at all.

Sharing his astonishment, Diitchar rhal Lers forgot her hauteur. 'We, interlopers? Is your ignorance so entire? There is no world beyond the fields and metals of the hull. This craft, this island is the construct of our Ancestors, of the Living People -- yes, even the crystal ma.s.s which you b.u.mptious vermin infest.' Her anger intensified. 'We have been generous too long. Anokersh, the stench of the creature offends me.'

'Go, then,' he said shortly. A vortex had hurled itself at his head; he felt the blinding migraine return. With betrayed surprise, his spouse stared at him for a moment. Her tail snapped twice against her legs; she turned and stalked from the room. The Director scarcely noticed. Curtly he told Stezna: 'Put it to sleep, and leave us.'

'Without an orderly?'

His head shot up. 'Can it harm me under anaesthesia? Do as you're told.'

'You fear the truth,' the prisoner began. It went into coma in mid-word, and Anokersh brooded over its inert bronze form, alone, with pain.

Half a million years _The Soul_ had plunged untended in the terrible dark, he knew. In all that remorseless time the quantal flicker of the computers had governed her course, under the command of the patient dreaming dead mapped in the Ancillary Core. In cycles of placid generations it had hatched out the slavey embryos, fed and trained the creatures, used their marginal motility and skills in maintaining the deserted craft. And all the while _The Soul_ accelerated, hurled by the energies of sundered quarks, plunging like a meteor into the appalling vectors of para-reality.

-- And the supernova had flared in the cruel crucifixion of an instant, only tens of light-years distant, the raging fire of a galaxy ignited, its fifty-five-day halflife compressed by the craft's monstrously elided ratio into a savage shrieking pulse of piercing radiation....

External gluon s.h.i.+elds faltered. The Ancillary Core was sleeted with a sidereal howl of hardest radiation. Had any crew walked the decks of _The Soul_, they would have perished in the instant of auric overload. Had they, impossibly, survived, had their groins -- against the Mission's plan -- retained fertility, they would have brought forth nothing viable. But the seed of the people was safe, locked under that central and most precious seal which guarded as well the Soul Core itself. It was the slavey stock that suffered mutation, that groaned for a hundred generations in cancer and deformity, retreating from the damaged computer's scrutiny, the mindless zeal of unscarred lines of newly quickened pongid servants; retreating, yes, into the dreadful heart of the injured crystal ma.s.s.

And there they had evolved. Anokersh whimpered. The beast on the float before him, leashed and pa.s.sive, was the child of ten thousand generations of an imploded, unspeakable ecology. It bore the desolating heritage of an intelligence -- an intelligence! -- shaped in total confinement.

He stood over it, his nostrils shrinking from its musk, the tender flesh of his palms pressed against its brutal, rhythmic ribcage. Its pelt was warm. Even in coma, the pulsations within that bulging cranium, the chemical messages below dream on their voyage from synapse to nerve, were charting their echo in the Resting Place of the People. Anokersh was cold, he shuddered, he brought the talons of his thumbs gouging down the animal's breast. He knew at last, without reprieve, what must be done.

*13. Deep Time*

Into the effulgence of the arc-lit crystal ma.s.s, his plumage imperial, Anokersh huj Lers stepped like a prince. He bore no energy weapon; the people dared not risk such potency falling into the hands of the ferals. The guns he and Diitchar had used to subdue the intruder had been returned to the locked weapons room. In one hand, tightly, the Director held a powered knife, a modified butcher's implement from the protein abattoirs. Behind him, their talons clas.h.i.+ng on bare metal, a dozen strong males pa.s.sed the perimeter line. All the shades of light flickered for an instant to shadow, and then brightened once more: the alarms had been reset. They went forward into feral territory.

T'kosh huj Nesh came up beside him, warily, the knife an extension of his artist's hand. 'Kersh, how did the computers let it get this far out of control? We should have been quickened thousands of years ago.'

They moved swiftly into the tunnel. The metal walls were an intellectual abstraction behind the sharp-edged mounds, the stalagmites, the frost spurs, the glancing violet stars and corona of the glacial Ancillary Core. They stepped carefully, keeping clear of the murderous crystal spines. The lancing icicles grew denser as they penetrated to the Core, a spectrum of jewels that hurled the eye into infinities of confusion. A male stumbled, his foot pierced; as he fell, blood matted his feathers from a hundred small wounds. His companion caught him as he cried out, held him tottering on one foot. Jik huj Lod bent, smeared the torn limb, squirted a covering. The male limped ahead, his knife thrust forward against a malignity for which none of them had truly been prepared.

Why? Anokersh thought. Because the computers had been damaged? Because the vast array of pre-planned scenarios had failed to include the possibility of biological subversion among the slaveys? Because the reliquary of the Ancillary Core, the acc.u.mulated wisdom of three million years, had collapsed crucially from homeostasis to random growth? Because, quickened at last, brought to adulthood by the crippled programs half a million years too late, this generation of the crew had been smug, comfortable behind the perimeters, betrayed by their confidence in the science of their species and their secondhand sense of mission? But these were hardly answers to T'kosh's question, Anokersh knew. His crawling skin told him that the ferals were watching, awaiting their advantage. His mind swam. We are no suitable heirs to the Old Ones, to the Parents of All, he told himself bitterly. We are as defective as the wild ferals.

He stopped short. Light split and danced at the intersection of what once had been a bay of the Core. The male behind stumbled against his heel, cursed. Anokersh spun about, his thoughts febrile and agitated. He lifted his knife.

'Listen,' he said urgently. 'What are we doing here? We have some blurred notion of reprisal. It's not enough.'

T'kosh said angrily, 'We can bring out the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds they have imprisoned here.'

'The Ancillary Core must be repaired,' said one of the males from the Engineering Clan. 'These animals have to be stopped before they -- '

'We have only two options,' Anokersh cried harshly. 'Don't you understand? We have to come to terms with the ferals, accept them completely -- or kill every last one of them.'

Blood rushed, clashed with the frenzied babble.

The Director seized T'kosh huj Nesh by the shoulders, yelled into his face. 'You know that we can't allow them to remain in the Core.'

A primal fear brought the artist's lips back to the sharp bones of his muzzle. 'Kersh, these are the sacred places of our -- '

'Can we exterminate the ferals?' he screamed remorselessly, shaken with nausea.

'How can you speak of killing?' T'kosh asked in loathing, pulling back from the Director's grasp. 'Have you become a wild beast, Anokersh? Have you abandoned all decent -- '

Lurching under the cataract of light, brain afire, the Director caught the chains of logic and instinct and brought them clas.h.i.+ng together. 'Brothers, the ferals have entered the collective soul of our people. They sit camped at the perimeters of our consciousness, of our being, of our ancestral heritage. It is no more possible to plan the deliberate death of a feral pongid than to consider the slaughter of one of our own brothers or sisters.' Distantly, he saw one of the males bent double, heard the retching. His own body cramped into agony. He said the appalling thing that had to be said. 'Brothers, we _must_ destroy the ferals.'

'Anokersh,' T'kosh said with terrible intensity, 'be silent.' The artist turned to the others. 'He was right. Reprisal is madness. We must turn back.'

The ferals leapt at them, then, howling in a travesty of speech. 'Do you see?' the Director cried, his powered knife useless in his hand. 'They have nothing to restrain them.' He saw the crude metal club coming at his head, a curve inexorable as gravity. The blow caught him at the back of the head.

When he tried to reach his bruised, abominably throbbing head, tight bonds held his arms.

In the dim light, he saw that most of the crystal ma.s.s had been hacked away from the hull. The pain was overwhelming. He opened his eyes again. Most of the power had long since been cut from this sector, but the autonomics had been obliged to leave some cables alive -- those adjacent to the hull, and to the Ancillary Core maintenance systems. Even so, he observed at once, there was clearly little enough electricity available for the ferals to waste any on illumination and warmth. Unbelievably, their deranged ancestors had somehow contrived a jumbled, makes.h.i.+ft closed ecology.

Rude, open tanks extended on every side, dull with ultraviolet lamps, atrickle with hosed chemicals. Vegetation straggled from the simple hydroponics vats, heavy with seeds. The blunt, herbivore teeth of the invading feral flashed in his mind. No, he thought with sudden understanding, they have no restraints. Sixty million years of carnivore inhibitions stood behind the People. But these creatures, he thought, might not hesitate to kill their own kind. There would be no genetic prohibition against the slaying of intelligence.

'To your feet,' a voice slurred. A wave of feral musk and sour sweat a.s.sailed his nostrils. He struggled up, looked into the blotched face. The pongid cuffed him; pain cracked through his head. Groggy, Anokersh stumbled across dry vines, unruly runners from the crude food vats, urged on by ungentle shoves. They have been isolated for ten thousand generations, he thought. Yet they speak our tongue. Are they so deeply in resonance with the Core? Or have they adopted the speech of their captives?

They came into a better-lit clearing. Perhaps the outer s.h.i.+elds inhibited the growth of the crystal ma.s.s here, for the impervious metal of the hull was visible under a thin skin of the memory lattices. The Director faced a scene beyond nightmare.

They have bred for intelligence, he thought, recoiling, but their flesh is ruined.

Grotesque shapes moved in the twilight. Near his feet, a hairless pup spat at him. Another cowered, scratching at the scabbed white scales that covered its body. Malnutrition, he realised. Carcinomas in their food supply. Our presence on _The Soul_ has driven them to desperation. Until the machines quickened this second generation of the people, he thought, the ferals must have made forays into the stores. Now, with the slavey guards under living command, the ferals are penned utterly into their redoubt. It is no wonder, he told himself, that they hate us.

An ancient creature jabbed at him with a strip of metal. Its teeth were rotted. Anokersh turned his head away, his gorge rising. With sudden clarity he knew what was required. He triggered the printed transceiver, subvocalized direct contact with the control computer. His feral guard looked at him suspiciously and failed to determine what was amiss; it shoved him into the centre of the clearing.

He gave the machine the Priority over-ride code. Step by step, in precise programming language, he instructed it and put its systems on hold. He switched to his spouse.

'Diitchar, they're detaining us in the vicinity of Hull-sector 71. Can you trace us?'

'Praise be to the Parents,' her voice cried. Then she said, 'Kersh, the sensors have come up on the Board from 71.' They had been quiescent since the computers sealed off the damaged pongids thousands of years earlier.

Several of the reprisal party were shoved into the clearing beside the Director. T'kosh lurched against him; hobbled as he was, Anokersh nearly fell. Praise the Ancestors, he thought, that I refused to allow Diitchar to come with us.

Her voice told him that she'd traced a service route to the clearing and linked it as an available subroutine. Muttering, he ordered the program to spring the magnetic locks on access inlets sealed since the isolation of the defectives.

The beasts formed them into a straggling crescent, separating them, pus.h.i.+ng them to their knees on the matted deck. Groans, sounds of rustling; extraordinarily, n.o.body spoke. Some paralysis of the will held each of them. T'kosh huj Nesh bared his fangs. Blood welled from his mouth. Since Riona had disappeared and returned, hatred had gnawed at him like acid. Muscles contracted under his plumage. His bonds held, cut visibly deeper into his flesh.

'Don't, brother,' Anokersh told him. The artist's eyes, half crazy, stared in contempt. 'T'kosh, we'll -- wait for their move.'

A dark icon, his face was ugly with fury. 'You have forfeited command,' he said. Several ferals moved toward them, fists bunching. 'You would not turn back. Now you demand -- '

'Hold your tongue!'