'Nothing.'
'Please, Hulann.' Banalog looked pained. 'This is for your own good. You know that, don't you?'
'Yes,' he said reluctantly.
'Then, will you tell me?'
'I can't.'
'You would feel guilty?'
He nodded.
Banalog sat back in his chair and was quiet for a long while. The machines continued to hum and lance their invisible fingers through Hulann. Banalog turned to the window and watched the snow falling in the dim light. It had been spitting for a day now, but it was putting the white stuff down in earnest finally, had been doing that since noon. He worked over the details he had thus far uncovered, munched them with his overmind until he thought he had the proper question to pose next.
'Hulann, does this have anything to do with something you have uncovered in your diggings?'
The monitors on Banalog's desk reacted violently.
'No,' Hulann said.
Banalog ignored the answer and paid close attention to the opinions of his machines. 'What have you found?'
'Nothing.'
'What could it be that you would consider so important that you would risk a washing and restructuring to hide it from me?'
Hulann was terrified. Suddenly, he saw his world falling down around him, crumbling to ruin, powdering, blowing away on a cold wind. His past would be erased by the washing techniques. His first two hundred and eighty-seven years would be taken from him. He would have no past for his children. The stigma would be borne by his family for a dozen generations.
Banalog raised his head, his lids stripped back, looking suddenly shocked. 'Hulann! Have you found a human in those ruins of yours? A living human?'
'You have!' Banalog gasped.
Hulann had a vision of Leo being dragged from the shattered, charred building. He had another vision of the boy's frightened face-and a final picture of the small, twisted, bloodied body lying on the frozen earth after the executioners had finished with it.
He came out of the chair with a swiftness he did not know he could summon, a swiftness reserved for the first two hundred years of a naoli's life. He went over the desk, not around it, tramping on the screens of the traumatist's data devices, flicking switches off and on as he scrambled over them.
Banalog tried to scream.
Hulann toppled the traumatist's chair, spilled both of them onto the floor, using his forearm to choke the other naoli's mouth so full that the call for help could not be heard. Banalog tried to push up. Though he was a hundred years Hulann's senior, he almost managed to break free.
Swinging his arm, Hulann cracked Banalog's head. It bounced off the floor. The wide, green eyes were shut off by the slowly descending double lids.
Hulann struck again, to make certain. But Banalog was unconscious and would remain that way long enough for Hulann to make plans.
Make plans.
The full understanding of his position came to him harshly, making him dizzy and weak. He thought that he might vomit. He felt the contents of his more sensitive second stomach surging back into his first stomach. But he managed to stop the regression there. Up until a moment ago, he had been a candidate for washing and restructuring. That had been bad. Now, it was worse. He was a traitor. He had struck Banalog to keep himself from being committed and to keep a human child safe. They would surely execute him now.
Once he had thought losing his past was the worst they could do to him, worse than death as a traitor. Now he realized this was not so. At least, restructured, he could give his children the heritage of his future deeds. But' executed as a turncoat, he would give them nothing but disgrace for centuries to come.
What could be done? Nothing. There was no way to salvage his family name. He was only thankful that he had bred so few children. He rose from Banalog and considered his next step. Suicide, at first, seemed the only honorable path. As not even that would redeem his name, it seemed silly. He had nothing now but his life. He must salvage that.
And the life of Leo. That too. For, after all, it had been for Leo that he had ruined himself. To let Leo die now would be to give an air of farce to the entire affair.
The first thing, then, was to secure Banalog so that he could not spread an alarm until Hulann and the boy were beyond the clutches of the Second Division.
Transferring the unconscious traumatist to the chair beneath the hood where he himself had recently sat, he searched the office for something with which to bind him. He uncovered nothing of value. At last, he took down the drapes to either side of the window and tore them into strips. He wet the strips in the attached toilet and secured Banalog to the chair. Both feet first, then both hands. He looped his rope around the naoli's shoulders and tied that strand to the chair. Then his chest. Then a strip across his lap and under the seat.
'That would seem enough,' Banalog said.
Hulann stood, startled.
'It would take a trick expert to escape from these.'
Hulann drew his lips over his teeth.
'No need for that,' Banalog said. 'You're doing what you consider correct. You are ill. You do not know better.'
Hulann turned for the door.
'Wait. Two things,' Banalog said. 'First, an injection of sweet-drugs so that my Phasersystem contact is no good. Then a gag for my mouth.'
Numbly, he went back, found the traumatist's sweet-drugs in the center drawer, filled a needle with a strong dose of the potent liquid form, slipped the stuff into a vein in Banalog's neck. Then he gagged him. All of this, he kept thinking, made no sense. Why was Banalog cooperating? Hulann was tempted to remove the wad of drapery material and ask the older naoli. But there was no time for that. He was a fugitive now. He had to move swiftly.
Chapter Three
The street of the diggings was deserted in the early evening's muddy light. The heaviest machinery that could not be easily removed from the scene was covered by blown plastic to protect it from the storm. Four inches of snow had softened the jagged outline of the ruins; it drifted into crevices and filled them up, swept over peaks and spikes, obliterating them. There was a sepulchral silence on the land, save for the constant humming moan of the wind and the swish of the flakes as they drifted over one another like specks of wet sand.
Hulann made his way along the shrouded avenue, trying to be as inconscpicuous as possible, though his dark body stood out painfully against the snow. He found the building where Leo waited, went down into the cellar, turning on the lights, back through the crevice in the rubble into the room where Leo waited.
The boy was asleep. Hulann could see nothing but the child's eyes, closed, and a bit of his brow. His face was almost totally buried in his covers.
'Leo,' he called softly.
The boy did not stir.
Now, Hulann thought. Now there is still time. I haven't wakened him. I haven't told him we're leaving. Now I should turn back before it's too late.
But it was already too late. He was well aware of that. From the moment he had attacked one of his own kind- Banalog-to protect a human, he had become an outcast.
Besides, he could remember the visions he had seen. Leo being dragged outside. Leo, frightened. Leo, dead.
