The Long Night

unpitying noon sky. “But what that little monster was doing meanwhile—” Abruptly he closed his mouth.

With equal haste, Jonafer said: “The other guides ran away, you have told me, as soon as they sensed you were angry. I’ve just had a report from Kallaman. His team flitted to the village. It’s deserted. The whole tribe’s pulled up stakes. Afraid of our revenge, evidently. Though it’s no large chore to move, when you can carry your household goods on your back and weave a new house in a day.”

Evalyth leaned forward. “Stop evading me,” she said. “What did Moru do with Donli that you might have prevented if you’d arrived in time?”

Fiell continued to look past her. Sweat gleamed in droplets on his forehead. “Nothing, really,” he mumbled. “Nothing that mattered… once the murder itself had been committed.”

“I meant to ask you what kind of services you want for him, Lieutenant Sairn,” Jonafer said to her. “Should the ashes be buried here, or scattered in space after we leave, or brought home?”

Evalyth turned her gaze full upon him. “I never authorized that he be cremated, Captain,” she said slowly.

“No, but—Well, be realistic. You were first under anesthesia, then heavy sedation, while we recovered the body. Time had passed. We’ve no facilities for, urn, cosmetic repair, nor any extra refrigeration space, and in this heat—”

Since she had been let out of sickbay, there had been a kind of numbness in Evalyth. She could not entirely comprehend the fact that Donli was gone. It seemed as if at any instant yonder doorway would fill with him, sunlight across his shoulders, and he would call to her, laughing, and console her for a meaningless nightmare she had had. That was the effect of the psycho-drugs, she knew and damned the kindliness of the medic.

She felt almost glad to feel a slow rising anger. It meant the drugs were wearing off. By evening she would be able to weep.

“Captain,” she said, “I saw him killed. I’ve seen deaths before, some of them quite messy. We do not mask the truth on Kraken. You’ve cheated me of my right to lay my man out and close his eyes. You will not cheat me of my right to obtain justice. I demand to know exactly what happened.”

Jonafer’s fists knotted on his desktop. “I can hardly stand to tell you.”

“But you shall, Captain.”

“All right! All right!” Jonafer shouted. The words leaped out like bullets. “We saw the thing transmitted. He stripped Donli, hung him up by the heels from a tree, bled him into that knapsack. He cut off the genitals and threw them in with the blood. He opened the body and took heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, thyroid, prostate, pancreas, and loaded them up too, and ran off into the woods. Do you wonder why we didn’t let you see what was left?”

“The Lokonese warned us against the jungle dwellers,” Fiell said dully. “We should have listened. But they seemed like pathetic dwarfs. And they did rescue me from the river. When Donli asked about the birds—described them, you know, and asked if anything like that was known—Moru said yes, but they were rare and shy; our gang would scare them off; but if one man would come along with him, he could find a nest and they might see the bird. A house he called it, but Donli thought he meant a nest. Or so he told us. It’d been a talk with Moru when they happened to be a ways offside, in sight but out of earshot. Maybe that should have alerted us, maybe we should have asked the other tribesmen. But we did not see any reason to—I mean, Donli was bigger, stronger, armed with a blaster. What savage would dare attack him? And anyway, they had been friendly, downright frolicsome after they got over their initial fear of us, and they’d shown as much eagerness for further contact as anybody here in Lokon has, and—” His voice trailed off.

“Did he steal tools or weapons?” Evalyth asked. “No,” Jonafer said. “I have everything your husband was carrying, ready to give you.”

Fiell said: “I don’t think it was an act of hatred. Moru must have had some superstitious reason.”

Jonafer nodded. “We can’t judge him by our standards.”

“By whose,, then?” Evalyth retorted. Supertranquilizer or no, she was surprised at the evenness of her own tone. “I’m from Kraken, remember. I’ll not let Donli’s child be born and grow up knowing he was murdered and no one tried to do justice for him.”

“You can’t take revenge on an entire tribe,” Jonafer said.

“I don’t mean to. But, Captain, the personnel of this expedition are from several different planets, each with its characteristic societies. The articles specifically state that the essential mores of every member shall be respected. I want to be relieved of my regular duties until I have arrested the killer of my husband and done . justice upon him.”

Jonafer bent his head. “I have to grant that,” he said low.

Evalyth rose. “Thank you, gentlemen,” she said. “If you will excuse me, I’ll commence my investigation at once.”

—While she was still a machine, before the drugs wore off…

In the drier, cooler uplands, agriculture had remained possible after the colony otherwise lost civilization.

Fields and orchards, painstakingly cultivated with neolithic tools, supported a scattering of villages and the capital town Lokon.

Its people bore a family resemblance to the forest dwellers. Few settlers indeed could have survived to become the ancestors of this world’s humanity. But the highlanders were better nourished, bigger, straighter. They wore gaily dyed tunics and sandals. The well-to-do added jewelry of gold and silver. Hair was braided, chins kept shaven. Folk walked boldly, without the savages’ constant fear of ambush, and talked merrily.

To be sure, this was only strictly true of the free. While New Dawn’s anthropologists had scarcely begun to unravel the ins and outs of the culture, it had been obvious from the first that Lokon kept a large slave class. Some were sleek household servants. More toiled meek and naked in the fields, the quarries, the mines, under the lash of overseers and the guard of soldiers whose spearheads and swords were of ancient Imperial metal. But none of the space travelers was unduly shocked. They had seen worse elsewhere. Historical data banks described places in olden time called Athens, India, America.

Evalyth strode down twisted, dusty streets, between the gaudily painted walls of cubical, windowless adobe houses. Commoners going about their tasks made respectful salutes. Although no one feared any longer that the strangers meant harm, she did tower above the tallest man, her hair was colored like metal and her eyes like the sky, she bore lightning at her waist and none knew what other godlike powers.

Today soldiers and noblemen also genuflected, while slaves went on their faces. Where she appeared, the chatter and clatter of everyday life vanished; the business of the market plaza halted when she passed the booths; children ceased their games and fled; she moved in silence akin to the silence in her soul. Under the sun and the snowcone of Mount Burus, horror brooded. For by now Lokon knew that a man from the stars had been slain by a lowland brute; and what would come of that?

Word must have gone ahead to Rogar, though, since he awaited her in his house by Lake Zelo next to the Sacred Place. He was not king or council president or high priest, but he was something of all three, and it was he who dealt most with the strangers.

His dwelling was the usual kind, larger than average but dwarfed by the adjacent walls. Those enclosed a huge compound, filled with buildings, where none of the outworlders had been admitted. Guards in scarlet robes and grotesquely carved wooden helmets stood always at its gates. Today their number was doubled, and others flanked Rogar’s door. The lake shone like polished steel at their backs. The trees along the shore looked equally rigid.

Rogar’s major-domo, a fat elderly slave, prostrated himself in the entrance as Evalyth neared. “If the heaven-borne will deign to follow this unworthy one, Klev Rogar is within—” The guards dipped their spears to her. Their eyes were wide and frightened.

Like the other houses, this turned inward. Rogar sat on a dais in a room opening on a courtyard. It seemed doubly cool and dim by contrast with the glare outside. She could scarcely discern the frescos on the walls or the patterns on the carpet; they were crude art anyway. Her attention focused on Rogar. He did not rise, that not being a sign of respect here. Instead, he bowed his grizzled head above folded hands. The major-domo offered her a bench, and Rogar’s chief wife set a bornbilla of herb tea by her before vanishing.

“Be greeted, Klev,” Evalyth said formally.

“Be greeted, heaven-borne.” Alone now, shadowed from the cruel sun, they observed a ritual period of silence.