Shon'jir

Stavros frowned, backed the sled, opened the door. "Walk with me," he said, "upstairs. You're going nowhere else, I trust.”

"Yes, sir," Duncan agreed. Stavros undoubtedly meant to put him off his balance, and he had done so. He was asked to accompany Stavros in public, before regul. It was a demon­stration of something, a restoration of confidence: he was not sure what. Perhaps he was being bribed, in subtle fashion, of­fered status and the alternative was transfer to Saber. Stavros made it very difficult to continue the debate.

The sled eased its way through the office door, past the ComTech; it passed the outer doors, into the corridor. Duncan overtook it as Stavros waited for him. Stavros did not lock into the tracks that could have shot him along at a rate no man afoot could match, but trundled along beside him at a very leisurely pace.

"First thing," said Stavros, :"no more library." And when Duncan opened his mouth at once to protest: "You have to walk among regul over there, and I'd rather not have that. Flower staff can find what you need, if you describe it. Do you understand me?”

"No, sir.”

They walked some distance in silence, until a knot of regul had passed them, and they turned the corner into the upward corridor. "I want you," said Stavros, "to spend your time on Flower as much as possible. Stay clear of the regul entirely. Work at your private obsession through cha

Duncan stopped on the ramp. "I still don't understand you.”

Stavros angled his sled to look up at him, a sidewise mo­tion of the eyes. "Yes, you do. I want you to apply your tal­ents and prepare me a full report on the mri. Use any authority you want that doesn't involve actually touching the mri themselves.”

"What value is that?" Duncan asked. "I'm no scientist.”

"Your practical experience," Stavros said, "makes such a report valuable: not for the researchers, but for me.”

"I'll need clearance over there.”

Stavros scowled. "I'll tell you something, Duncan, and you listen to me. I don't share your enthusiasm for preserving the mri. They were a plague in the universe, a blight, at best an anachronism among species that have learned their lessons of civilization to better advantage. They are probably the most efficient killers in all creation; but we didn't bring them to ex­tinction, nor did the regul nor did you. They are dying be­cause they have no interest in comprehending any other way of life. No quarter, no prisoners, no negotiation or com­promise: everything is black and white in their eyes, nothing gray. I don't blame them for it; but their way of life was destruction, and they're dying now by the same standard they applied to others: nature's bias, if you like, not mine. Con­vince me otherwise if you can. And be careful with them. If you don't respect them for what they are, instead of what your delirium remembers, then those two mri will end up killing someone: themselves certainly; you, likely; others, very possibly.”

"Then I will be allowed access to them.”

"Maybe.”

"Give me that now, and I can talk with them as the staff can't. Keep the medics and their drugs away from them while they have minds left.”

"Duncan " Stavros started moving again, slowly, turning the corner at the top of the ramp. "You were the one excep­tion to their no-prisoner rule, the one exception in forty years. You are aware, of course, that there may have been a certain irrational sense of dependency generated there, in the desert, in their environment, in your unexpected survival. They gave you food and water, kept you alive, contrary to your own natural expectations; you received every necessity of life from their hands. When you expect ill and receive good instead, it has certain emotional effects, even when you really know nothing about the motives of the people involved. Do you know what I'm talking about?”

"Yes, sir. I'm aware of that possibility. It may be valid.”

"And that's what you want to find out, is it?”

"That, among other things.”

They reached the door of Stavros' apartments. Stavros opened it by remote, slipped in and whipped the sled about, facing him in the doorway. Evans stood across the room, seeming surprised at them: a young man, Evans Duncan looked at him, who had been the focus of his bitter jealousy, and found a quiet, not particularly personable youth.

"Take the afternoon off," Stavros said to Duncan. "Stay in the Nom. I'll prepare an order transferring you to Flower and salving feelings among the civs over there. I'll send you a copy of it. And I expect you realize I don't want any feelings ruffled over there among the scientific staff; they don't like the military much. Use tact. You'll get more out of them.”

"Yes, sir." Duncan was almost trembling with anxiety, for almost all that he wanted was in his hands, everything. "And access to the mri themselves “

"No. Not yet. Not yet. Go on. Give me time.”

Duncan tried to make a gesture of some sort, a courtesy; it was never easy at the best of times between himself and Stavros. In the end he murmured something inarticulate and left, awkward in the leaving.

"Sir?”

Stavros turned the sled about, remembered that he had or­dered lunch when he returned. He accepted the offered mug of soup and scowled at Evans" attempt to help him with it, took it into his own hands. Returning function in his afflicted limbs made him arrogant in his regained independence. He analyzed his irritation as impatience with his own unrespon-ding muscles and Evans merely as a convenient focus. He murmured a surly thanks.

"Files on the mri," he ordered Evans. "And on Sten Duncan.”

Evans moved to obey. Stavros settled and drank the soup, savoring something prepared entirely by humans, seasoned with human understanding of spices. It was too new a luxury after the long stay in regul care to take entirely for granted; but after a moment the cup rested neglected in his hand.

The fact was that he missed Duncan.

He missed him sorely, and still reckoned him better spent as he had just disposed of him. The SurTac had entered serv­ice with him as a bodyguard disguised as a servant, drawn out of combat at war's end to dance attendance on a diplo­mat. Duncan was a young man, if any man who had seen ac­tion at Elag/Haven could ever again be called young. He was remarkable in his intelligence, according to records which Duncan had probably never seen another of the young men that the war had snatched up and swallowed whole before they had ever known what they might have been. Duncan had learned to take orders, but SurTac-style: loners, the men of his service, unaccustomed to close direction. They were usually given only an objective, limited in scope, and told to accomplish it: the rest was up to the SurTac, a specialist in alien environment, survival, and warfare behind the enemy's lines.

Stavros himself had sent the SurTac out to learn Kesrith.

And Kesrith had nearly killed Duncan. Even the look of him was changed, reshaped by the forge of the Kesrithi desert. Something was gone, that had been there before Duncan had gone out into that wilderness his youth, per­haps; his humanity, possibly. He bore scars of it, face half-ta

The regul bai was correct when he perceived Sten Duncan as an enemy. The regul as a species had no more deadly en­emy than this, save the mri themselves. Duncan hated, and Duncan knew the regul better than any human living save Stavros himself, for they two had come alone among regul, the first humans to breach the barriers to contact between regul and humanity, here on Kesrith.

And most particularly Duncan hated bai Hulagh Alagn-ni: Hulagh, who had done precisely what Duncan accused him of doing, killing the mri who had served regulkind as merce­naries, obliterating a sapient species. Hulagh had done it for desperate fear, and for greed, which were intertwined. But bai Hulagh was moved now by fear of disgrace among his own kind and by dawning hope of gain from humans; he had become stranded on the world he had hoped to plunder, among humans whom he had hoped to cheat and disgrace. And bai Hulagh thus became vulnerable and valuable.

The fact was that one could not, as Duncan tried to do, say regul, and comprehend in that word the reasons and ac­tions of a given member of regulkind. A quasi-nation of mer­chants and scholars, the regul; but their docha, their associations of birth and trade, were each as independent as separate nations in most dealings. Hulagh was of doch Alagn, and Alagn, a new force in regul politics, had stopped the war. The employers of the mri mercenaries who had wrought such destruction in human space were doch Holn, the great rivals and enemies of Alagn.

Doch Holn had ceded Kesrith at war's end, compelled by the treaty; and in the passing of Kesrith to human control, Holn had fallen to Alagn. But Holn had had its revenge: it had cast Hulagh Alagn-ni into command of Kesrith ignorant of mri and of the nature of Kesrith. The weather had turned: Alagn had been faced with the collapse of their effort of evacuation and plunder of Kesrith; and confronted with in­coming humans, Hulagh had panicked. In that panic, seeking to avert human wrath, Hulagh had done murder.

It was possible that by that act of murder, that a

Duncan, who believed in absolute justice, could not accept such a thought; but the truth was that doch Alagn and its ruler, Hulagh, were in every respect useful to Kesrith, most particularly in their reliance on humans and in their burning hatred for doch Holn, who had maneuvered them into this unhappy circumstance. For Duncan, as for the mri, there was only black and white, right and wrong. It was impos­sible to explain to Duncan that Alagn must be cultivated, strengthened, and aimed at Holn, a process too long-range and too little honest for the SurTac.