Conquerors' Heritage

And then, as suddenly as if a switch had been thrown, it was gone. He gasped again, fighting to bring the world back into focus. The commander was still standing in the doorway talking to Doctor-Cavan-a, pointing to his right away from the metal room with the hand that held the cylinder. He finished the gesture, brought the hand back in front of him again—

And Prr't-zevisti jerked in agony as the Elderdeath pain again lanced through him.

But only for a beat. He had barely enough time to gasp when the pain again shut off.

It seemed harder this time to regain his balance and equilibrium; the Human commander seemed to be walking up a slanted wall as he stepped away from the doorway and back to his equipment pile. With an effort Prr't-zevisti fought his way through the dizziness, almost too drained to be angry. So it had finally happened. His captors had finally tried a full-fledged Elderdeath attack on him. But he'd survived it, and he hadn't given himself away.

Maybe they hadn't expected him to. Doctor-Cavan-a had stepped to the door of the metal room now, looking at the commander and paying no attention to either his fsss cutting or Prr't-zevisti himself. The commander, for his part, was still talking into his cylinder as if nothing at all had just happened.

The cylinder.

Prr't-zevisti stared at the device, an icy chill creeping across the last residue of Elderdeath ache. The cylinder. Moved into the doorway, into direct line with his fsss cutting, as the Elderdeath attack began. Taken away as it ended. And moved briefly out of line with the commander's gesture during the equally brief lull in the attack.

And suddenly Prr't-zevisti had it. The truth. The horrifying, devastating truth.

The Humans' Elderdeath weapons weren't weapons at all. They were communication devices.

Prr't-zevisti hovered there, staring at the commander and Doctor-Cavan-a, his mind spi

But it hadn't been a lie. Not from the prisoner's point of view. As far as he knew, the Humans had done nothing more aggressive than attempting to communicate.

And had promptly been fired on. In what the Zhirrzh commanders had naturally considered to be pure self-defense.

Which meant that this entire war was nothing but a gigantic mistake.

Numbly, Prr't-zevisti made his way back into the metal room, settling into his corner and down into the grayworld. A mistake. A horrible blunder of misunderstandings.

And if this war, then why not all the others? All of Zhirrzh history—all the wars of defensive conquest against aliens who'd attacked them on sight. Had all of those wars been sparked by similar mistakes?

There was a sound, and Prr't-zevisti moved back to the edge of the lightworld. Doctor-Cavan-a had come back inside the room, followed by the Human commander. They held a brief conversation, something with a lot of words Prr't-zevisti didn't understand, and then the commander went out again, closing the door behind him.

For a few beats Doctor-Cavan-a sat quietly, staring at the door. Then, exhaling audibly, she turned back to her work on the fsss sample. Trying, if her conversations could be believed, to understand its importance to the Zhirrzh.

And Prr't-zevisti came to a decision.

He came up to the closest edge of the lightworld, a small dark voice in the back of his mind reminding him as he did so that this whole thing could be nothing more than an elaborate stratagem, a trick to draw him finally out into the open. But it was a risk he had to take. If there was even a small chance that he'd stumbled on the truth here...

His movement caught Doctor-Cavan-a's attention. She turned her head and froze, her mouth dropping soundlessly open as she saw him—

23

It was a long, lonely drive down the dusty roadway that led north toward his mother's house. Thrr-gilag saw only a few buildings along the way, farmhouses and related outbuildings, most of them fairly distant from the roadway. The only other vehicles he passed were lumbering planters out working the fields. Little to see, little to do except for the largely automatic process of driving down a deserted roadway.

It left him a lot of time for thought. They weren't pleasant thoughts. He tried to concentrate on the attempt to save the possibly alive Prr't-zevisti from probable death, and to speculate on how such a success might be bartered into reinstatement of his bond-engagement to Kl

His mother. Thrr-gilag sighed, feeling a twinge of guilt. With all the rest of the flurry that had accompanied it, the truly basic consideration hadn't even occurred to him until midway through the flight from Unity City. Thrr-pifix-a had tried to steal her fsss because she didn't want to become an Elder.

She'd failed. Which meant that choice had now been taken away from her. And Thrr-gilag still couldn't decide whether he was relieved or saddened by that.

There were a half-dozen Elders hovering around his mother's house as he pulled up in front of it. "Hello," one of them said as he stepped out of the runabout. "Who are you?"

Thrr-gilag eyed him. "Why?"

The other seemed taken aback. "I was just wondering. I'd heard something happened here last latearc, something involving Overclan warriors and some kind of criminal activity. Just wondered if you knew anything about it."

Thrr-gilag grimaced. So the rumors had already started. Inevitable, really. With so little to occupy their time, Elders were to rumors as liquid fuel was to fires. "Sorry," he said shortly, striding past the Elder toward the door.

"Wait a beat," a second Elder said, moving into Thrr-gilag's path. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going inside," Thrr-gilag said. "Is that any business of yours?"

"Do you have permission from the occupant to enter?"

"I have the key," Thrr-gilag said, holding it up.

"But do you have permission?" the Elder repeated.

Thrr-gilag stopped. "I have all the permission I need," he ground out. "I'll ask again: what business is this of yours?"

"This is our land," a third Elder said, his voice and ma

And suddenly Thrr-gilag was sick and tired of Elders. "That's dead bisfis effluvia," he said flatly. "And you know it. You never paid the slightest bit of attention to Thrr-pifix-a until you smelled a chance at some gossip. That's all you want, and you can forget it."

"How dare you speak that way to your Elders?" the third Elder demanded. "We are—"

"What you are is invited to get lost," Thrr-gilag cut him off. Pushing past and through the whole group of them, he unlocked the door and went in.

He half expected the Elders to join him, at least long enough to drop a few scathing comments about his ma

More likely they'd simply returned to their family shrines, to tell in great detail about the rude young male who had shown up at the mystery-shrouded home of Thrr-pifix-a; Kee'rr.

His mother hadn't lived there for very long, but even so the house was rich with memories. For a few hunbeats Thrr-gilag just wandered through the various rooms, looking at the furniture and pictures he remembered from his childhood, fingering the various pieces of edgework she'd loved to do and been so proud of. Here and there was a pouch or scarflin she'd been working on, as yet unfinished. Beside the kitchen sink were her gardening tools, painstakingly cleaned from the previous fullarc's work and laid neatly out to dry. The trowel still held a drop of water in its curved surface; picking it up, he turned it over, watching the drop dribble off.