“Do you have any other information?” the Procurator said in a dangerously calm voice.
“No,” Thosby said sulkily, retreating into Codger.
“None at all?” asked Poracious, unbelieving. She retrieved the pipe from where it had fallen and held it out to the man, like one using a morsel of food to coax an unwilling animal from its den.
“So far as I know, she hasn’t found anything at all interesting,” mumbled Codger, snatching the pipe. The last time he had monitored the recording had been days ago, but he did not mention this.
“She?”
“She who?” asked Poracious in a silky tone.
“The survivor.”
“Who in the name of all the excremental and sexually active deities now or ever thought of is this survivor?” demanded the Procurator, his face gray with rage and frustration.
“This girl who seems still to be there,” said Codger. “This XZ51.”
The other three in the room exchanged looks of amazement.
“What girl is he talking about?” asked the ex-king.
Poracious Luv sat down and held her hands high, commanding silence and attention. “Let’s make sense of this! Anent seems to be saying the entire team on Perdur Alas has disappeared except for one girl or woman designated by the code number XZ51. That one is still on Perdur Alas with a functioning sensory recorder. Is that more or less correct?”
“Said that,” muttered Master Spy, biting hard upon his pipe stem, his lips writhing back to disclose a gray-coated tongue and stumpy, smoke-blackened teeth, at the sight of which Poracious averted her eyes. “Already said that!”
“You have the records.”
“No,” he said between clamped teeth.
“You don’t have the records? Where are they?”
“At my house.”
“You will provide them?”
“That was the plan.” It was a favorite saying of Thosby’s, used in reply whenever anyone asked him when he would do something he had said he would do a long time previously.
“Not a plan,” whispered the Procurator, his hand at his throat, which felt raw and dry. “Not a futurity, not a possibility, not a matter to be thought over. It is now, an immediate order. Go, at once. As rapidly as it is possible for you to do so. Without doing anything else or going anywhere else. Go to your house, and get the records. Bring them here!”
“I’d better go with him,” said Poracious, heaving her bulk from its chair. “He might get sidetracked.”
The two got only as far as the slightly open door when a young woman of Dinadh pushed it open, bowed politely, and spoke to Thosby Anent in a cheerfully guileless voice:
“Sir Thosby, when I learned you were on your way to meet with the Procurator of the Alliance, it occurred to me you might want the records you have been so assiduously compiling.” She held out several datachips, offering them to Poracious.
Poracious broke the astonished silence.
“And you are?”
“Chadra Tsum, ma’am. I am housekeeper for Thosby Anent.” She relinquished the datachips with a significant glance, which said, “I am who and what I am, but this matter is larger than who and what I am.”
“You were both thoughtful and correct,” the large woman said.
“I believe this room is equipped with retrievers. If the Procurator wants the latest information.” Chadra bowed to Poracious, to Thosby, a perfect model of polite servitude.
“Pushy, unpleasant woman,” Thosby snarled as Chadra turned away. “Always interrupting me when I’m busy.”
“Perhaps she wishes to direct your attention to something important,” whispered the Procurator. “Had that occurred to you?”
“Oh, sir,” said the Codger with a patronizing smile, “we are too concerned with things we believe are important. When one considers the infinite nature of time, that all races including our own are doomed to live and perish like the candle flame in that infinitude—”
“Good day,” said Poracious, taking him by the shoulder and moving him gently toward the door. “We can’t thank you enough for your help.” She shut the door behind him, then turned, the datachips in her hand, murmuring, “Where’s the retriever?”
“What’s that beside the window?” the Procurator asked plaintively. “Surely that’s a retriever.”
The ex-king took the plat from Poracious and inserted it into a wall-mounted retrieval complex that had been designed to look like a landscape sculpture. “Is there a code?” he murmured, stepping politely aside and averting his eyes.
Poracious referred to her wrist-link before entering an activation code. The unit hummed briefly, then the walls of the room disappeared and the three were on Perdur Alas, assailed by sounds, sights, smells. And a taste!
They gagged.
Before them, observed from some distance, through a twiggy growth, monstrously shaggy flesh encircled something they could not see, great cliffs of hair reared high as hills, walls of old dog, of lairs deep in layers of fatty bones, the taste of beast, hot reeking blood, and sour spit. From behind them came the sound of the sea. Between their teeth a twig was jammed to keep their mouths slightly open so they wouldn’t gag on the taste … on the dreadful taste.
The scene jiggled and moved as they rose laboriously. Their point of view changed. They climbed, up and up, then peered out once more from above, down at the inside of that wall of flesh, seeing bare skin upon which patterns moved, around and around the abandoned camp, memories of slaughter, retelling of the chase.
They raised their eyes. Through the air, from the south, three things came toward the others, reaching out with appendages that seemed to stretch forever, joining others, making other enclosures. In the middle distance, a dozen shaggy mountains moved in a slow procession.
What was it they tasted? Oily, soapy, rancid, bitter, nasty …
Poracious Luv, from her vision of Perdur Alas, stretched her arm through the vision to find the reality of the retrieval control on Dinadh. She turned it off. While the other two retched and gagged she unashamedly wiped out her mouth with the hem of her garment.
“Technician!” she said. “Call for a technician to filter out
